


For Your Entertainment

by KellerProcess



Series: Bound Angel [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, BDSM, Beelzebub Has a Penis (Good Omens), Berith uses he/him pronouns, Bottom Gabriel (Good Omens), Chastity Device, Cock Cage, Dominant character, Enthusiastic Consent, Gabriel Has a Penis (Good Omens), Hastur and Ligur being stupidly in love, Jealousy, Light Angst, Oral Sex, Orgasm Control, Orgasm Denial, Other, Restraints, Spanking, Subdrop, Submissive Character, Top Beelzebub (Good Omens), Topdrop, beelzebub uses she/her pronouns, but still very explicit, dagon uses she/her pronouns, gabriel uses he/him pronouns, hastur uses she/her pronouns, ligur uses he/him pronouns, mostly Gabriel fretting about their relationship, quote unquote tamer than the two previous fics, romantic friendship between beelzebub and dagon, the hell squad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-18 12:16:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 22,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21510904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KellerProcess/pseuds/KellerProcess
Summary: Gabriel has some doubts about his new relationship with the prince of hell. Well, make that a lot of doubts. Is he in her realm as the result of a mutiny in heaven? Has he merely given in to a temptation?Or, worse: has she grown tired of him?Meanwhile, Beelzebub deals with two unwanted visitors to head office: the very angry archduke of Wrath and the very slimy archduke of Greed.(This fic takes place immediately after the events of “Hey Pretty” and won’t make sense if read out of order.)
Relationships: Beelzebub & Dagon & Hastur & Ligur, Beelzebub & Dagon (Good Omens), Beelzebub/Dagon romantic friendship, Beelzebub/Gabriel (Good Omens), Hastur/Ligur (Good Omens)
Series: Bound Angel [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1465087
Comments: 8
Kudos: 34





	1. Chapter 1

Gabriel had no idea how his master would punish him for his disobedience in the great hall. Not that he could have truly helped himself! Really, who wouldn’t have come while riding a cock as magnificent as hers?

But she was going to punish him. That’s what mattered.

“Come on,” she growled as she yanked on his lead. “Stop dragging your feet.”

Oh.

 _Oh_.

“I know you’re getting hard,” Beelzebub said as they reached the door to her rooms. “I don’t even need to look to know. I can feel it. I can _smell_ it.”

Could she?

He got even harder.

Harder still as she pivoted and slammed him against the door.

“Look at you,” she growled as she shoved her knee between his legs. “Not two minutes since you had my cock, and what do you want again? Tell me.”

“Your cock,” Gabriel panted as her kneecap grazed the curve of his erection. His very much _uncovered_ erection.

Standing naked and helpless before her made him even harder.

“You’re a slut for it, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Master.” Gabriel spread his arms above his head and parted his thighs.

Profane. Offering himself was profane. Lustful.

“A slut,” he agreed. “Please, Master.”

And how he loved it.

Beelzebub stepped backward, jerking on his lead, and crashed to his knees with a harsh little cry.

His eyes were level with the bulge beneath her trousers.

“You’d love to suck it, wouldn’t you?”

Gabriel tried to swallow the lump in his throat. His mouth was far too dry for that.

“Well?” Beelzebub prompted.

“Yes,” Gabriel choked.

_Even though I don’t exactly know how that works._

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, Master.”

She inched closer, the bulge in her trousers near enough now to kiss—

Only to sidestep him and open the door.

“On the bed. No,” she snapped as Gabriel tried to stand. “Turn and crawl. No stopping to touch yourself, or I’ll really pull on thizz.” She yanked the lead harder. “I’m not afraid to make you hurt, pet. And not in a way you’d like.”

It wasn’t possible to hurt him too much. He’d never been surer of anything. But he advanced on hands and knees, raising his ass in invitation.

“No,” Beelzebub repeated. But she did slap him across it, getting him right on the balls with her palm.

Gabriel hissed and his movements faltered, but he kept going.

“Lie down on your back. No touching yourself.”

 _This is a punishment?_ But when Beelzebub released her hold on the lead, Gabriel clambered up onto the sagging mattress and settled back against the cushions.

His master stood at the baseboard with her hands behind her back. Still as a statue. Fierce as a general. Saturnine as a gargoyle on a cathedral.

That was an odd comparison. It made his cock ache nonetheless.

He spread his legs for her in invitation, but she shook her head as the left corner of her mouth sharpened into a sickle of a half-smile.

That didn’t exactly help the aching.

“I see,” she said. “You think you’ve made up for it, don’t you? You knelt. You crawled. You climbed on the bed and put your cock in the air.”

She stepped to the left and stalked along the side of the mattress.

She reminded him of the lion that had escaped Eden to threaten the first humans.

How had they felt about that?

Her eyes were nitrided steel as she sat next to his hip.

And something made of steel rattled in her hands as she brought them forward.

Gabriel looked down at them and tilted his head in confusion.

The item in her right hand was easy enough to identify. Gabriel may not have known much about human inventions, but even he had seen a padlock before. This one was painted a glossy black that reminded him of the way flies’ bodies shined when sunlight hit them at just the right angle. He recognized the red sigil on it too: the curls, lines, and geometry of Beelzebub’s true name.

The item in her right hand, though, he had never seen before. Painted in the same glossy black, it reminded him of a small wire basket humans might use to store those round, crunchy things they made that always smelled like sunlight, rising yeast, and sprouting seeds. Bread, was it?

But bread usually wasn’t usually that long, was it?

Gabriel pointed to it. “What is that—Master,” he added quickly before she could scowl and correct him. Were they going to eat again? And would bread “taste” as good as chocolate had?

Beelzebub placed the padlock and the … basket? … on the battered nightstand at the left side of the bed, then sat next to him on the mattress.

“Look at you, pet.” Beelzebub trailed two fingers along the curve of his erection. “How needy you are. How dezzperate for it you are. And how _big_ you are.”

Was that a bad thing? Gabriel grimaced. Of course, ethereal beings had no real standards for things like genitalia. But all the big, thick human books and the thinner, smaller books—zines, were they called?—said that bigger was better for penises. The pornography Sandalphon had shown him—which seemed to be where humans talked about their genitals the most—always said that the ideal penis was something like twenty-eight centimeters when erect. But a penis that big had ruined the lines of his pants, no matter what underwear he wore to keep it from flopping or slipping sideways—even when it wasn’t erect. A little under twenty-three centimeters had been the best compromise he could make.

“Is that bad? Would you like it to be smaller, Master? Thinner?” The zines and especially the pornography had also said that thicker was better.

Maybe demons didn’t like long and thick?

He should have asked her last nig—

Beelzebub’s smile was a bit softer than usual as she continued stroking along his effort. “No. It’z perfect. But it just shows what a greedy little angel you are. And vain.” Her smile sharpened again. “Let’z add vanity to the list of your sis, hm?”

Gabriel’s hips arched off the bed as she slapped him across the cock.

“Hm. Greedy _and_ lustful. But we already knew that.” Another slap. And another.

Could a cock get too hard?

Long, thin fingers coiled around it like serpents and began to tug.

“Riding my lap wasn’t enough, was it?”

“N-never enough,” Gabriel panted, rocking his hips upward, fucking into that tight grip.

“That’s right. That’s all you want, isn’t it, pet? My cock in your arse, my hand around your cock. Your lips around my cock.”

Yes, he should have thought earlier of doing that with his mouth. But he still had no idea how it went. “Please, Master, may I do that for you?” he said anyway.

Beelzebub’s strokes became just a bit harder. “So eager.” She gave it a tug. “But thizz is different than taking my cock up your tight little hole. And I’m going to teach you. She stood. “Thighs open. Hands at your sides.”

When Gabriel obeyed, a strip of firm material slithered from the sides of the bed, coiled around each wrist, and locked.

“Basilisk skin,” Beelzebub explained as he looked to his right and tugged experimentally on the restraint, which shimmered like the underside of a storm cloud when the sun peeked out from above it. “Supple. Softer than hellhound hide, but twice as strong.” The mattress barely dipped as she brought one knee down on it, then climbed onto it. “I’ve outfitted nearly every piece of my furniture with them, and this bed with several.” She crawled forward, and her calloused palms were so warm as they cupped his insteps and caressed them. “Do you know what that means, pet? I can put you in any position I want; fuck you in any position I want. Bind you any way I want.”

Gabriel’s eyelids fluttered as he whimpered, recalling several positions he had seen in all the human books, from the pornography to their religious texts. All of them? Could she put him in _all_ of them?

A slap to his thigh made his eyes snap open again.

“Well?” Beelzebub asked with a smirk that made his cock twitch this time. “Have you had enough so far?”

“No, master. Not enough.”

“Good.” Beelzebub ran her hand down the line between his thighs, then yanked them apart. “Spread. As far as you can. And watch. I’m going to teach you a very important lezzon.” When Gabriel obeyed, she crawled between.

“Arms at your sides. You’ll need them there to keep from arching your back. Legs over my shoulders, pressed against my sides,” she instructed as she crouched before his cock, rolling her shoulders forward into a hunch.

Curious, Gabriel did as she ordered.

Beelzebub looked up at him with that same knife-edge smile. “You’re going to learn a new trick now. One you’re going to just love.” With a wink, she grabbed his thighs and nearly crashed them against her knees.

She lowered her head and—

Gabriel screamed in pleasure and nearly kicked her hips.

“Stop that,” she growled as she lifted her head from his cock. “Only do that if you’ve had enough. Was that enough?”

Gabriel swallowed and shook his head.

“Then relax.” Her voice softened as she ran her hand down the slightly soft curve of his stomach, toying with the faint line of hair pointing down (also something he’d seen in the books). “Grab the covers if you need to. That’s what they’re for. Try to hold your hips still. But rock them up, if you must.

“Now watch. Feel. _Learn_. Because tonight, we’re going to switch places.”

And then she lowered her mouth around him again.

Oh, Lord—

Sunlight.

It was better than _sunlight_.

Better than—than—

Than things he had no names for, except he knew that this was just ... better.

Beelzebub’s head rose and fell: slow, slow, steady, slow, slow. Like—

 _Well_. What a time to think of _him_. But! Gabriel had once checked in on—the renegade. Not his name. Never his name again. Not even silently, in Gabriel’s mind.

_Just a routine check. A how-are-you. The renegade had been in a park when Gabriel had—_

“Mhh.”

Had she forbidden him from moaning?

“Mhhh!”

But the park. Gabriel stopping by to check.

_“Everything okay?”_

_A treat in that soft, pudgy hand. Something that smelled like the chill of glaciers, that strange sweet scent of the equator. Sugar? Is that what they—_

“Mhh. Master!”

_Red. Unnaturally so. Like paint. Brighter than paint._

_He—the renegade—lowering his lips to it, pulling them back._

_Steady. Slow. Eyes closed. A happy little moan._

“Mhh!”

_“What is that?”_

_“A popsicle, Archangel.”_

Had that been the word?

So many words for these human confections.

Oh, she was warm.

Not hellfire-hot. Just warm.

Were all demons’ mouths so warm?

So wet?

So _insistent_?

_“And why … why do you consume it?”_

_“It’s delicious. Sweet. A pleasing taste for humans—so I’m told.”_

_“Hm.”_

_“Would you like one? They come in pairs—well, sometimes. Usually better to eat one at a time when they do.”_

_A crinkle as he offered it. Wrapped in something clear and transparent. Something that made it shine._

_Just as red._

_“Quickly, though, Archangel. I-if you please. They melt so fast. Even in this cool weather.”_

_Red._

_Gabriel’s fingers twitched._

_No!_

_Into his pockets. Now!_

Keening. Wordless.

Faster.

_The renegade’s expression. Expectant. Hopeful._

_But the red of it. The red of that damned thing!_

_Too much like temptation._

_“No. I don’t—”_

So _much like temptation._

_“I don’t—”_

A lump in his throat then.

A lump in his throat now.

_“I don’t—pollute myself with these….”_

_A wave of his hand, a dismissal._

Temptations. Say it.

Say it!

_“Gross matter.”_

Temptation.

Wild black hair.

Slim hands, clenching his thighs. Restraints for them, like the clamps she’d put on his wings last night.

Her lips. Red.

Red.

_No._

Not temptation this time. Not when he’d wanted—

Begged—

Prayed?

Yes. In his way.

_On his knees before the windows._

_“Take me.”_

_“I want to be taken.”_

_“I need to_ be _taken._

_“And I can’t—"_

_The windows gave him Earth._

_But he couldn’t reach it._

_The glass was in the way._

_And something clearer than the glass…._

_Like that plastic wrapper that made the thing it covered shine._

_And he wouldn’t look._

_He would._ Not _. Look._

“ _Master!_ ”

The word poured from his mouth, as he poured into hers.

Something shattered.

And everything was clearer.

And like the wall of Eden, it would not be repaired.

What was seen and known could not be un-seen and un-known.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gabriel does NOT like cock cages.

He didn’t remember what had happened next. Just that it had felt good, and sinking into the warm darkness had felt even better.

So did waking up in her arms with his head tucked just above her breasts.

“Hello.” The word vibrated through him. Her tone still had an edge of authority, but one that was far less sharp than she used when addressing her court—or addressing him before her court. Her hand cupped his cheek. The touch was light, like warm rain. Though the rain did not have such rough fingers.

“You may speak.”

He was beginning to think of this as her bedroom voice; the one she used when he pleased her.

“Hello.” Gabriel closed his eyes as he leaned into her palm.

“Did you enjoy yourself, pet?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Very good.” With two fingers beneath his chin, she tilted his head upward and to the side, and he parted his mouth for her chapped lips.

To think, he would get to spend all day like this. Entirely at her mercy.

When she eased away from the kiss and released him, Gabriel whimpered in frustration.

“Oh, no,” she chided as she swung her legs over the bed. “No, none of that. Rest is over; you’ve got another lezzon to learn today.”

Gabriel’s smile returned as he rolled over onto his side to watch her. She smirked back with just a hint of cruelty as she lifted the bread-basket thing from the nightstand.

“You’re going to feed me bread, Master?” He clamped his hand over his mouth, realizing too late that he didn’t have permission to say that.

Sure enough, that got a glare from Beelzebub. Then she chuckled as if the mistake was of no great consequence. “This doesn’t hold bread,” she explained. “It holds cocks. Yourz, specifically.”

Gabriel pressed his lips together and drew them back in confusion.

“Don’t give me that look. You’ll enjoy it,” Beelzebub informed him. “Because you like everything I do to you, don’t you, pet?”

“Yes, Master.” Though Gabriel couldn’t help but wonder if this would be the first thing she did to him that he wouldn’t like one bit.

“That’s right.” Beelzebub ran her fingers along the top of Gabriel’s cock, close enough that he could feel their heat, yet far enough away that he couldn’t feel the press of her calloused fingers. The movement left a trail of silver slick in its wake, which she then spread with her index finger.

“If you get hard again, I’m not going to be so forgiving this time.”

Somehow he managed to keep his cock under control as she unfastened the circle from the bottom of the cage and slid it over his balls, at which point she stopped moving it.

“Hm.” A touch from her finger made the ring widen enough so that she could push his penis toward his testicles, then slide it through the ring as well. “Looks like even I underestimated how imprezzive your effort is.”

If his wings had been out, they would have fluttered.

Beelzebub scooted the ring up until it was completely behind his balls. Another touch from her tightened it just slightly, but not enough to hurt. Until now, he hadn’t noticed that the ring had a bar protruding from it that looked to be about three centimeters thick. A hole passed through it at the top.

Beelzebub pushed at the ring again, nudging it in a circle until the bar sat at the top of his cock. “Not painful?” she asked as she looked up at him.

“No, Master.”

“Because it’z not supposed to hurt. One of the things I’m going to do to you that isn’t supposed to,” she said before pivoting at her hips to reach for the cage on the nightstand. When she brought it over, Gabriel could tell now that it definitely hadn’t been made to hold bread. And now that its purpose was so clear, he couldn’t help but feel a bit silly for thinking it could have.

Beelzebub slid the cage up his shaft, then raised it just enough so the bar could fit through the tab at the cage’s top.

_Oh._

“You look like you have a question.”

Gabriel’s throat felt too dry to ask it. But he tried anyway. “That padlock … you’re going to lock me into this, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.” Beelzebub turned and lifted said lock from the nightstand and turned it so her sigil faced him. “Otherwise, you’d just miracle it open, and then you’d never learn to control yourself, would you? Now watch.” As she ran her thumb over her true name, the curved bar snapped open.

 _Enough_ , Gabriel wanted to say. _Please. Enough. I can’t control myself around you. I can’t. I don’t want to, and I can’t._

He opened his lips to tell her that, then closed them.

_But I want to try. The way you’ll look at me if I succeed…._

Beelzebub slid the padlock into place, then swept her finger over the sigil again. The bar locked with a sharp little click that said it, just like its owner, wouldn’t brook any whining.

“I’m punishing you for a reazzon,” Beelzebub said as she parted his legs and crawled between them again. “My entire court knows what a little slattern you are.”

 _Which means Michael knows too. Michael probably knows everything that goes on down here, even before it happens. They probably always did. Of course._ It was a bitter thought, one that sent a crackle of ice through him, so he cut it off and shoved it away.

“They know because they saw what I did to you, and just how much you liked it. But that’s all they get to see. Who do you belong to, pet?”

Gabriel swallowed around the lump in his throat. “You, Master.”

“Then why should I let anyone else see you get hard for me? Oh, they can enjoy looking at your body,” she said before he could answer, as she swirled her fingertip around his glans. “That’s why you don’t get to cover yourself anywhere at any time without my permizzion—especially not when you’re kneeling at my feet.”

That rough touch felt so good, but even though his dick agreed with him, it refused to do anything to let on that it did.

“Frustrating, isn’t it?” Beelzebub soothed before flicking the tip of his cock. “Good. Because right now, you’re not only being a little slut, you’re being a little liar.” She tisked. “Oh, so many sins on that long list of yours. You say that you belong to me, but you’ll get hard in front of my entire court. You’ll get hard in front of my main staff. And you’d do more than get hard in front of my dukes, wouldn’t you? I almost think you’d get hard _for_ them—either of them, especially Hastur.”

She flicked his glans again, and Gabriel bit back a moan.

“So you see, you’ve got to be taught, or demons might question my authority. It’s a weak prince who lets their servant show everyone what belongs only to them.” Another flick. “And,” she drawled, “I’ve found that the best way to teach anyone to do anything isn’t through reward or punishment. That encourages even more lying and sneaking and greed, don’t you think?”

“I….” But Gabriel got the feeling that wasn’t really the kind of question you answered.

And anyway, Beelzebub stopped whatever else he might have said by sliding up his body and kissing him.

“That’s what I’m going to teach you today, pet,” she murmured against his lips. “I’m going to do everything you’ve ever wanted me to do to you.”

Gabriel squirmed as she kissed along his jaw. “Mh-hm. That’s right. I’m going to fuck you everywhere. In your arse.” A kiss along his collarbone. “In your mouth.” A kiss at the swell of his pectorals. “Between your thighs.”

He squirmed again as she circled her tongue around his left nipple. “And everywhere and in every other way I can think of that you might enjoy. And you can scream, and thrash, and moan, and touch, and kiss, and beg all you want, but you won’t be able to do the thing you want most. And every time I take it off to test you, and every time you fail that test by coming without permission, it goes back on.”

Beelzebub’s head turned to the left and her right eye twitched as the unmistakable jangle of a telephone echoed through her rooms. Gabriel followed her gaze but couldn’t see where the sound was coming from.

It ceased after three rings.

“And don’t think you can just miracle this cage away or miracle it open,” Beelzebub went on as she turned back to him. “Did you see the sigil on the lock, pet? Of course you did.” She returned to kissing along his neck. “And you know blessed well that it means no one else can open—”

This time, Beelzebub gritted her teeth as the phone squalled. Her fists clenched and trembled just slightly throughout the four rings this time.

When she turned back to him, she smoothed a hand through her tangled black hair as if regaining her composure and took a deep breath before her expression turned controlled and predatory again.

“And,” she continued, “don’t think you can get out of this by being clever and efforting a pussy.” She flicked the nipple she had been abusing. “My sigil keeps you from doing that too. And even if you c—”

This time, the phone didn’t stop after four rings.

“Heaven’s light and harp strings,” Beelzebub snarled as she climbed out from between Gabriel’s legs. “I _fucking_ said—”

The farther she stomped away from the bed, the more incoherent her swearing became. Not that Gabriel minded being unable to hear obscenities about heaven, angels, and God.

No, hell’s choice in profanity didn’t upset him.

Whoever was on the other end of that line, however….

Well. They should feel lucky that he had abandoned all of his angelic powers the moment he had willingly knelt before the demon they had just taken away from him.

***

 _Bless her. Bless her._ Bless _her._

The prince of hell was never fully “off the clock,” as humans said. For as long as hell had existed, Dagon, Ligur, Hastur, and even far lower-ranking demons had knocked on her door whenever an issue came up that only she could address. Since 1900, however, they had simply dialed her candlestick telephone—a surprisingly up-to-date gift her dukes had procured after raiding the home of one of their wealthier victims. But because only three demons had its number, and two of them were probably fucking somewhere that shouldn’t even be possible to fuck _in_ , that left only one possibility for the identity of te demon who clearly wanted to get her scaly head separated from her scaly body.

Beelzebub snatched the unit from the desk and ripped the transmitter from its cradle.

“Tell me, Dagon,” she snapped. “Has Maintenance been unable to find out why holy water is dripping through the ceiling?”

“I—”

“And is heaven’zz new leader unable to turn it off?”

“Boss—”

“No? Becauzze I remember telling you that those are the _only_ reasonzz—”

“Boss! An archduke is callin—”

“And I don’t care if God Herself—"

“ _Will you_ please _shut up_ _and listen?_ It’s _Mammon_.”

Beelzebub didn’t answer for a full thirty seconds. She knew because she counted each one to keep from attempting to discorporate Dagon through the blessed line. “I’m sorry. I’m still not underzztanding why you couldn’t tell him to fuck off.”

“Well, I’d _love_ to, _boss_. _Believe_ me. But until he talks to you, he’s going to _keep calling back_ and _tying up the line_ , now isn’t he?”

Beelzebub sighed. She was right. Bless her. The archduke of Greed was nothing if not greedy about everything, including demons’ time.

So much for clocks and the being off them.

“All. Right.”

Dagon said something else, but Beelzebub didn’t want to hear it, so she slammed the transmitter back into place and returned the phone to its table with equal roughness. And counted out another thirty seconds. Then another. And another.

Wrath demons weren’t the only denizens of hell who lost their tempers. Being of hell was like having an itch under your skin that you could never scratch, and one that never itched in the same place. This meant that every demon was irritable on some level, and that every demon eventually became a frothing, snarling mess.

The prince of hell was no exception; yet at the same time, Beelzebub knew that she had to be. She could be aggravated, she could roll her eyes, she could snap at demons who, frankly, should have known how to do their fucking jobs well enough that they wouldn’t piss her off in the first place. But shouting and pouting like a wrath demon in need of a good arse-kicking and a timeout in a nice cold cell in the ninth circle?

No. She was a prince, not a demon.

On count one hundred and twenty, she opened her eyes, straightened her jacket, and returned to the bed.

“Something’zz come up,” she explained as Gabriel looked at her with questioning lavender eyes. She ran her hand through his messy hair, then leaned down. Their kiss began hard and hot, like hellfire licking across the bodies of the unrepentant. Gradually, it slowed—gentled into something like candleflame. Or, at least, Beelzebub’s vague memory of such a thing.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she promised before giving him another, shorter kiss. “You can do anything you like here, as long as you don’t leave my rooms.” She flicked the bars of the cage. “Or try to remove this.”

“Yes, Master.” But Gabriel’s smile was less buoyant than usual.

“We’re both dizzappointed,” she informed him. “I’ll try not to be too long.”

She was the prince of hell. And looking back at the caged angel on her bed would have made her forget that for the second time today. So Beelzebub kept her gaze straight ahead as she left her rooms, shutting the door behind her.


	3. Chapter 3

Despite what heaven thought, hell wasn’t a lawless, flaming garbage pile. Well, at least not usually. Sometimes, the little irritations, the moderate discomforts, and the major disappointments of living in this place just made it feel like one. And if enough demons finally lost their tempers like Beelzebub had just done, then, yes, Beelzebub had a huge fucking mess on her hands that only she could clean up—sometimes, in fact, a mess that even took the form of a lawless, flaming garbage pile.

Beelzebub suspected that she was about to walk headlong into one such huge fucking mess, and that shouting at Dagon had just poured petrol all over it. She couldn’t recall, even vaguely, when the she and her principal secretary had last had words.

 _Calm. Focus._ As she made her way to her office through the maundering throngs of head office’s many employees, Beelzebub repeated the words, and rehearsed exactly what she was going to say to mollify a possibly unmollifiable Dagon.

And just what she was going to do with the archdemon who had pissed them both off.

When hell wasn’t in crisis mode—which was most of the time, despite what heaven thought—it ran by its own set of rules—which it had, whether or not heaven saw fit to recognize them. The loudest of these unspoken rules concerned the nature of the ethereal beings who lived there. Demons weren’t calm. They weren’t gentle. And they weren’t nice.

There were always exceptions, of course, but those exceptions were rarely misfits like the … traitor whose name Beelzebub had declared _beneficum memoriae_. More often, they were on the opposite end of the spectrum of evil. More hellish than hell itself.

Yes, that was a good description of the Dark Council, Beelzebub decided as she passed Hastur and Ligur’s office, noting as she did that both dukes were damnably hard at work for once.

Hell’s archdukes were more hellish than the average demon. Being the embodiment of an individual sin that was just as mortal as it was multifaceted gave them little choice to be otherwise. Each was an extreme, larger-than-life personality. This made them not only less predictable than the average demon, but far more dangerous. Even Hastur on her worst day wouldn’t have so much as imagined challenging one of them. 

And of the six of them, Mammon was Beelzebub’s least favorite by far. The archduke of Greed and the ruler of the Duchy of the Northern Americas was not only the most irritating but the most persistent.

Unfortunately for him, his prince had endless patience and was entirely unimpressed by him.

And he would do well to remember that.

As Beelzebub entered their shared office, Dagon looked like a hurricane whose mercy the corpses of pencils on her desk had sought and been denied.

“Dagon,” she began, just as she had rehearsed, “I—”

“It’s fine, boss,” Dagon said with a wave of her hand that showed she was still clearly annoyed, but that they needed to hash this mess out later.

Beelzebub nodded, indicating both her understanding and a promise that they would. “So, Mammon, then. What’s he on about now?”

“Oh, he won’t tell me, of course. Even though I am the one that’s. Going. To. Dis. Cor. Por. Rate. Him,” she seethed, thrusting both hands at the telephone on her desk. A single light blinked on its base like the eye of an angry cyclops.

“Not before I do,” Beelzebub promised as she walked over to the desk. “How long hazz he been tying things up?”

When head office had actually received a more modern telephone in the late 1990s, it had had four working lines. In the past thirty-odd years, three of them had flickered into oblivion, becoming one among the countless work orders Maintenance had been “looking into” ever since. Until they solved the mystery—an even more unlikely feat than discovering the source of the leak above Hastur’s desk—head office had only one outgoing phone line.

One that Mammon or someone representing him had refused to get the heaven off for—

“Two hours,” Dagon seethed. “Two _fucking_ hours now. After I told him three times that your day was booked and he needed to make a _fucking_ appointment just like everyone else. If this keeps up much longer, I’m sending anyone from any other court who comes here to moan about the line being tied up _right up his_ —”

Beelzebub spread her hand over Dagon’s shoulder and squeezed. Squeezed again. When they remained dangerously close to her ears, she cupped the other and began to knead.

Dagon glared at the light once more, then sighed, shut her eyes, and eased into the massage.

“You’re not forgiven yet,” she informed Beelzebub. “Just remember that.”

“I doubt you’ll let me forget it until I am.”

Dagon made a huffy little sound of agreement. “Anyone else would’ve taken the fucking hint,” she grumbled, gesturing at the phone again.

“But Mammon isn’t anyone else.”

Dagon snorted. “Give a clown a duchy—”

“Expect him to make it a circus.” Beelzebub’s mouth twitched into a smirk. 

“You’ve got that right.” Dagon straightened her ponytail as Beelzebub released her shoulders. “What should we do, then?”

“We wait him out.” Beelzebub walked to her desk and rolled the rusting chair out from under it. “If anyone shows up here with buizznezz, well, you’ve already told me where you’ll send them.”

Dagon gave her the kind of toothy grin that anyone else in hell would have feared, then broke into a cackle that sounded almost like her usual self. Almost. “Oh,” she drawled, “I am _really_ looking forward to that, boss.”

“I’m sure you are, you Misery Maven,” Beelzebub replied. “All right, now.” She plopped down in the chair and put her feet up on her desk. “What _actual_ buizznezz needs my attention firzzt today?”

The line flashed through thirty more minutes. Forty-five minutes later, an incubus from Asmodeus’s court showed up wanting to know why the archduke of Lust couldn’t reach Beelzebub to deliver the report she had demanded. At the fifty-two–minute mark, a legionnaire from the archduke of Envy’s court arrived to have a moan about how unfairly its leader felt they were being treated by, apparently “not being good enough to talk on the phone with the prince—not that she even cares, of course.” At an hour and nineteen minutes on the dot, Berith, the archduke of Wrath himself, could be heard all the way from the lobby, screaming every obscenity he knew (and some he clearly didn’t) in a demand to know “ _WHAT THE SHITTING FUCKING SHIT IN HEAVEN IS GOING ON IN THIS FUCKING SHITHOLE?!_ ”

Berith had never been particularly good at using his words. Or his indoor voice.

Each time a disgruntled messenger had arrived, Dagon had placated them as best she could, before politely informing them of the reason for the delay. When she explained the situation to Berith, however, the thunderstorm of cursing, crashing, and screaming that followed had worried Beelzebub enough to send her out into the lobby.

Not that Dagon couldn’t handle him, but—

Well, but the archduke of Wrath was known to be very stupid indeed when he worked himself up into a rabid mess like this—and very dangerous.

He also tended to shift into his true form—that of a tyrannosaurus rex. Which Beelzebub had no patience for.

“Prince Beelzebub,” he snarled from his reptilian, sharp-toothed maw as she strode into the lobby (in which far too many demons were standing about watching the ongoing carnage instead of working). “Tell your receptionist—”

“I have nothing to say to you that my _principal secretary_ hasn’t already,” she said in her coldest tone. “Nothing’s new or impressive about you being angry, Berith. You’re just wasting our time—and _yours_ —by being angry in and at the wrong court.”

That shut his toothy jaws right up. “So Mammon’s really been on his bullshit again?” he asked as he shrank back down into a less dramatic, more humanlike shape.

Beelzebub raised an eyebrow.

“That _twatting little shitstain of a—_ ” the archduke growled before piledriving his massive, muscular body through the lobby floor. Accustom to years of such treatment as it was—and typically from the same demon and the more irascible members of his court—the concrete simply rolled over on itself and mended the hole.

Beelzebub and Dagon barely made it back to their office before nearly collapsing onto each other in laughter.

Approximately two minutes later, the line blinked off, whereupon Dagon immediately took the receiver off the hook.

If Mammon wanted an audience now, then he could take time out of his busy schedule to pursue it.

And fifteen minutes later, he did.


	4. Chapter 4

Despite the differences in the sins they embodied, each of hell’s archdukes had one thing in common: they had all been Satan’s co-conspirators, which made them the most powerful of all demons. They were each forces of evil, just as powerful as the forces of nature; and like fire and flood, thunder and lightning, volcano and eclipse, one dismissed them at one’s doom.

Mammon, however…. Well.

Beelzebub had never known quite what to make of him. Whereas the rest of hell’s ruling class had chosen striking and grandiose corporations as dwelling places for their true demonic forms, Mammon had always favored a spindly, drab, and entirely mundane version of a body humans commonly called “male.” Though he had altered it somewhat over millennia, these alterations were usually cosmetic and subtle, just like the cuts of his luxury suits. Since the fifteenth century, for example, he had kept his skin pallid and his hairline receded. His face was neither old nor young, comely nor ugly, nor in any way remarkable. If Beelzebub hadn’t been looking at it for centuries, she doubted she would have been able to pick him out of a crowd of humanity.

The only things that could give away his infernal nature were his eyes. The longer you stared into them, the emptier and more lifeless they appeared.

Beelzebub had never understood why. Lifeless and empty were the last things one could accuse a demon of being.

Whatever the reason, the showman’s smile he gave Beelzebub as she and her dukes met him in the lobby did not reach those hollow eyes, just as it never did.

“Prince Beelzebub.” Mammon spooled out his usual bow to her, one that was clearly insincere, but just respectful enough for plausible deniability. The two dukes standing behind him, Moloch and Cthylla, repeated the gesture with slightly less finesse, even though their corporations were even more finessed than the most attractive of humans could hope to be.

“Mammon,” she returned with just enough steel to let him know she saw through all three of them.

For the span of a breath, each noble waited for the other to speak.

Finally, Mammon’s smile brightened even further as he clapped his hands together. “Well,” he said, “it seems I called at a bad time.”

“No shit,” Hastur muttered just loud enough for all of them to hear. Ligur barely managed to stifle a snort of approval.

Mammon’s smile wavered slightly but remained politic. “And I do apologize for that, Hastur,” he continued, “but I wouldn’t have persisted if my business wasn’t urgent.”

Beelzebub didn’t catch Hastur’s remark that time, but Ligur’s answering snicker was loud enough to make Mammon’s smile falter this time. Mentally, she instructed her flies turn one by one toward her dukes to let them know they needed cut the crap. Their snickering stopped, but Beelzebub could practically feel the derisive mirth roiling around inside them both.

“Everything to you is buzzinezz,” she said as the flies resumed their endless circles around her head. “And if it’s the urgent sort, we can conclude it in ten minutes.”

“Yes, of course.” Mammon glanced around the lobby, where more than a few demons were pretending not to eavesdrop on their conversation. “But, ahh … somewhere more secluded, please. I’m not used to conducting private business _en plein air_.”

Fuck, Beelzebub hated everything about how he talked. But if giving him a one-on-one audience, so to speak, would make him leave sooner, she’d allow him this concession.

“The breakroom, then.” She turned and beckoned her dukes to follow.

The little shit had probably expected her to lead him right to her office. And not to turn her back on him, as members of the Dark Council were usually wont to do.

Nonetheless, he caught up to her in seconds.

Like its celestial equivalent, hell’s head office lacked much in the way of an Ethereal Resources Department, or anything else designed to see to its staff’s well-being. Its breakroom was the exception. The fact it contained only a broken coffeepot, a few battered chairs, and a table bearing some suspicious stains was beside the point. As was the fact that Dagon had festooned the walls with posters calling anyone who used it several combinations of profanities that she had probably learned from centuries of listening to Berith rant about nothing.

The disgusted little curl to Mammon’s lips was there and gone in less than half a second. It was still the best thing Beelzebub had seen all morning.

Beelzebub settled into one of the rickety chairs and swung her heels up onto the table as Hastur took a seat at her right, and Ligur sat at her left.

“Ten minutes, then,” she said as Mammon and his dukes joined them.

“Yes. To business.” Mammon steepled his fingers in front of him on the desk. “I would like to host the council’s next quarterly conference.”

Beelzebub continued to regard him with her usual bored expression. Like heaven he did.

“It’s Berith’s turn.” The left corner of his mouth twitched with a smirk, as if he were going straight for the punchline without bothering to tell the joke fist.

He didn’t need to say anything more, though. No councilmember enjoyed meeting four times each year to discuss official business. But they enjoyed doing so even less when it was Berith’s turn to play host. These conferences were bad enough when they didn’t devolve into shouting matches and fistfights by the second day.

“Really, Your Lowness, I’m not sure why he was so hostile to me today—well, beyond the obvious,” Mammon continued, pressing his fingertips together. “I was trying to contact you for his sake.”

All right, that was unexpected. “And why would you do that?”

Mammon exhaled in a chuckle, which made his smile even more congenial. “Your Lowness, he despises having anyone intrude upon his court—and he sees almost everything as an intrusion, especially one of our quarterly meetings. I think we could all do without him wielding both of his dukes as clubs at us when someone merely _suggested_ that he should ‘lighten up.’” He curled his fingers in the air as he said the words.

“What you think doesn’t matter. Leviathan will host our meeting next week. Berith’s turn will follow. Just like it’s always done.” She moved to swing her legs from the desk.

“ _Please_ , Your Lowness. Hear me out.”

Beelzebub could not recall him using that word in the ten thousand years she’d been unlucky enough to know him. She kept her ankles where they were.

“You’re full of shit, Mammon. Eight minutes.”

“Your Lowness.” He leaned in. “Let me level with you.”

Sighing, Beelzebub braced herself for him to do just that.

“Leading up to Armageddon, Earth was falling apart. You remember. Climate change. Political unrest. Brexit. Market fluctuations—”

_Which you probably masturbate furiously to._

“Wars, and rumors of war.” Mammon’s shook his head. “He was more excited than any of us were to fight. And when he was denied the chance— Well. We’ve all seen his behavior since then, Lowness. And we can’t deny it any longer.

“Yes, we all walk a tightrope between wickedness and destruction. We’re demons, after all—and as hell’s leaders, we understand that delicate balance better than anyone. And in my opinion, Your Lowness, the archduke of Wrath is teetering dangerously. Satan help us all if he falls the wrong way. Particularly with heaven just salivating for a reason—any reason—to attack. Especially now that Michael is in power.”

Naturally, what happened in head office never stayed in head office. Still, Beelzebub was surprised that news of heaven’s change in leadership had reached Mammon so quickly. She would have liked to get ahead of that particular piece of news—and the rest of what had happened yesterday in head office’s great hall, which was probably also yesterday’s gossip by now. But that was something she’d have to sort out later.

“Six minutes, Mammon.” 

“Your Lowness.” Mammon tapped his manicured nails against the desk in thought. “I know how you and the rest of the archdukes feel about me.”

“Do you.”

Mammon nodded and leaned farther in, resting his thin elbows on the table. The gesture made Beelzebub think of a Wall Street executive making sure he had everyone’s attention before he told a joke that was as unfunny as it was pointlessly lewd.

Fuck, how she’d hated the 1980s.

“I’m the youngest of the seven of us; the last She created—and I was a mere principality at that. I can’t even imagine what I must have looked like, sneaking into our master’s war council, wanting to play with the big kids.” He chuckled, and Beelzebub had to admit the situation really had been comical, particularly when Mammon had begged like a little child for Satan to let him stay.

He had not looked so cute or comical, of course, when wielding a spear against Uriel.

“And I do know my place, Lowness,” Mammon continued. “In matters of lust, or wrath, or any other sin—gluttony, for example”—he gestured expansively toward her—“I’m not an expert. But I do understand costs and benefits, assets and liabilities. And right now, Your Lowness, Berith is a liability. One wrong move from him, one impetuous, foolhardy, ill-advised temptation or action and…. Well.” He clapped his hands together. “We may have a war on our hands that we don’t want and, at present, are in no place to win. I mean, you’ve seen how fragile Earth is right now: socially, politically.” He snorted with good humor. “ _Economically_.”

“Four minutes,” Beelzebub informed him, though she’d nearly forgotten to remind him of the time. At her sides, Hastur and Ligur were paying equally close attention to him.

“Lowness, really. This morning is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. When one of his staff couldn’t reach Secretary Dagon about a routine administrative matter, did he seethe about it to himself for a while before having them call back? He’s certainly done that before, so we know that he _is_ capable of controlling himself when he wants to. Did he take his annoyance out on one of his ushers, like he usually does? He’s also done that before—as I’m sure you remember.”

Oh, she did. The court of Wrath’s entire complement of hell’s rotund little goblins had threatened mass suicide rather than spend another day “being that demon’s bowling ball _and_ skittles,” as one disgruntled usher had put it.

“No,” Mammon continued, “he didn’t even send one of his staff to investigate. Even sending one of his dukes would have been … overkill, but hardly inappropriate. Instead, he came right to my administrative wing, smashed through the door to my office, and threw Moloch through my window so hard that he discorporated.”

“He did,” Moloch confirmed from Mammon’s left, running a hand through his fashionably messy chestnut hair. “We couldn’t even miracle that body back together. I’m a wrath demon myself, Your Lowness, but I’ve never seen anything like what he did to me—or to Archduke Mammon’s office.”

“Or to Pandemonium itself, Lowness,” Cthylla piped up, smoothing a tentacle-like coil of blond hair out of her eyes. “Archduke Berith broke through our security forces and went on a rampage, damaging three districts. We won’t be finished miracling the repairs for at least a month. We’ve even had to bring in some of Pandemonium’s original architects to supervise.” She grimaced. “It’s wreaking havoc on our BRB. Berith-related budget,” she explained when Beelzebub raised an eyebrow. “It was that bad. I’ve never imagined an archduke could _be_ that out of control, even him.”

“I just don’t think he’s up to hosting a meeting,” Mammon said.

On the one hand, Mammon was a clown whose masturbation habits probably actually did fluctuate with the world’s stock markets. On the other, he did have a point. If Mammon and his dukes were telling her the truth—and given how easily verifiable their story was, Beelzebub doubted they were lying—Berith’s stunt today could have ended up far worse for head office and its demons, had Beelzebub not redirected him to Mammon’s apparently now-smashed-up door.  
  
Perhaps she needed to consider his idea.  
  
“We’re at time, Mammon,” she said, even though he technically had forty-six seconds left. “I’ll inform you and the other archdukes of my decision in twenty-four hours.” She swung her ankles off the desk and stood, followed by her dukes.

“Yes, Lowness.” And Mammon and his dukes rose as well.

_Well, at least he’s smart enough to know we’re done talking._

“Dukes Hastur and Ligur will see you out.”

“Of course.” Mammon and his entourage bowed again, though with no more sincerity than they had roughly fifteen minutes ago. “We anxiously await your decision.”

Beelzebub dismissed them with a wave, then headed back to her office as Hastur and Ligur escorted the American contingent back to the lobby.

Somehow she doubted that Mammon was feeling any anxiety at all.

***

“Something’zz wrong here,” she said as her dukes made themselves comfortable on the rusty chairs in front of her desk, Dagon having left to fetch them some coffee. “What did you make of all that?”

“Well, I think the answer’s simple, boss, and it’s a pretty bad one. You see, he’s got this pencil dick that—”

But Ligur was laughing too hard for Hastur to finish, because she was giggling along with him.

They quieted immediately when Beelzebub’s eyes narrowed.

“Sorry, boss. Wrong place, wrong time.” Hastur suddenly became very interested in her fingers, which began twitching through and around each other.

“Yes. Though off the record, I don’t dizzagree,” she said, which got Hastur out of her hunch and her hand back in Ligur’s where it belonged.

“I don’t trust him. Never have,” Ligur said. “I mean, have archdukes played nice with each other before? ’Course they have. We’ve traded off meeting locations since hell began.”

“And it’s not like some courts don’t play nicer with each other than others,” Hastur agreed. “How long’ve we been all chummy with the Court of Lust and the Court of Sloth? Only this doesn’t feel like that at all. Mammon’s always kept to himself, yeah? Flash court, flash city, flash demons, but that’s as deep as it goes. What’s the term for it? ‘All style, no substance’?” she addressed this to Ligur, who nodded tentatively.

“What’s he doing, suddenly so concerned about another archduke?” Hastur went on. “Especially one that just wrecked his entire office, fucked up part of Pandemonium, and discorporated his favorite duke? Nothing good, I’m sure.”

“It could be he _wants_ us to be suspicious,” Ligur mused. “But that doesn’t seem like him. Too … subtle.”

“Or maybe too obvious,” Dagon said as she entered the office with a tray of cracked mugs and a coffeepot stained with drops of hard water. “It’s not just the breakroom one; the coffeemaker in the executive suite’s fucked now, too, boss. So it’s cold coffee again,” she explained as she set the tray on Beelzebub’s desk and dragged over her own chair.

“Why do we even have a Maintenance Department if they won’t fix a blessed thing?” Hastur growled as she miracled the sludge in the pot into a roil.

“Well, if you wouldn’t incinerate half the department on the regular,” Dagon sniffed as she attacked the coffee with a miracle of her own—one that only made it boil harder and higher.

Clearly, her bad mood from this morning had returned. If it had ever truly left.

Hastur pouted. “Well if they’d—”

“If this is about that ruddy pipe again, Hastur, I’ll—” 

“We’re getting off topic,” Beelzebub informed them as she stilled the coffee. “Dagon? Your ideas?”

The principal secretary huffed out a deep breath as she lifted the coffeepot and filled a mug, which she pushed toward Beelzebub. “It’s always an agenda with him. But, unfortunately, I think you should take him up on his offer.”

“Didn’t you want to bite his throat out after last meeting?” Ligur reminded her.

“I still do. But you didn’t see Berith this morning, now did you? Two seconds after he shows up, he turns into a dinosaur and starts stomping about, smashing things up and swinging that stupid tail out at anyone in the way. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle,” she said when Beelzebub brought her legs to the floor and sat forward in her chair. “But if you hadn’t come in when you did, boss, I think that would’ve changed, and fast.”

It wasn’t like Dagon to admit to something being out of her control, but it _was_ like her to leave anything unsaid that didn’t need to be said. In this case: _You’re the only one who could’ve stopped him if it’d come to that. You’re the only one who can take down an archduke of hell._

“Then, is it your opinion that Berith needs to be … defused?” she buzzed.

“I think he needs watching so he doesn’t do something we’re all going to regret,” Dagon said with a nod. “And I think letting him oversee an undertaking as big as our next meeting would make him do something very, _very_ stupid.”

Beelzebub nodded.

“Earth’s in a lot of trouble right now, ain’t it?” Hastur said before taking a swig of her own coffee. “Not that I give a fig about the place, mind, but with this Michael business…. Well, if Berith gets the right humans more riled up than they already are, we don’t know how old Wank-Wings’ll play it, do we?”

A little bit of frost spread across Hastur’s favorite nickname for heaven’s new leader. Or should Beelzebub think of Michael as heaven’s regent? Would Gabriel get tired of what she and he were doing and want to go back to business as usual? Did he think it was just a sexy little game and she didn’t really—

 _Gabriel! I wasn’t supposed to be away this long. What time is it now?_ Of course, all the fucking clocks in this office were broken or perpetually running ahead or behind—after all, it wasn’t currently seven p.m. in America.

_And if it is, does that mean it’s later here than I thought it was?_

She had never experienced the feeling that submerged her then. Though if she’d had to put a name to it, she might have considered it to be guilt.

_Doesn’t matter. He’ll understand that work is work. He’ll have to. He knows what it’s like. He’s the only other one in heaven or hell who would know the shit that coworkers and subordinates can—_

“Boss?”

Beelzebub blinked back to the present. All three demons were staring at her in concern. Hastur was even chewing on her nubby nails.

_Right. The Berith situation. Fuck him in the eye._

“No,” she tested, “no. Michael has always been inzzzcruitable. We don’t know what heaven’s responzze would be.”

They were still on that part of the conversation, weren’t they? The three demons nodded, which suggested they were—though Hastur still looked concerned.

“Ligur? Thoughts?” she prompted, before anyone could ask her what wool she’d been gathering and where.

“If he was as bad today as Dagon says—”

“Which means he was,” Dagon said through a scowl.

Ligur’s eyes shifted to yellow, which usually indicated that he was annoyed, but being good-humored about it. “ _Since_ he was as bad today as Dagon says, I think you should take Mammon up on his offer. Which doesn’t mean you should be less suspicious.”

“Is this something we should put HOT on?” Dagon asked. Her fingers were already hovering near the phone. 

It wasn’t as though the Hell Observation Team wasn’t already spying on every other duchy but the Court of Sloth—who didn’t really give a shit about treason. Or that every other duchy wasn’t spying on head office save for the Court of Sloth—who also didn’t give a shit about anything else, for that matter. But activating a few of their sleeper agents in Mammon’s capital city wouldn’t be a bad idea.

“Yes. Ligur, call the azzets in Pandemonium who can keep an eye on Mammon without getting his eyes on them. I want daily reports on my desk.”

“Yes, boss,” he said, earning a sour look from Dagon.

 _Really, what in the heaven is her problem today?_ Beelzebub was demon enough to admit she’d fucked up by chewing Dagon out, but had Dagon really expected her to be thrilled about having her honeymoon interrupted?

“Hastur, you’re on our active agents in Berith’s duchy,” Beelzebub continued before she could get lost in her thoughts again. “Until further notice, they’re on high alert so we can get ahead of any tantrumzz that could start a war—human or otherwise.”

“Yes, boss!”

“Dagon, I’ll handle this call with Berith.” She nodded at the principal secretary, who nodded back in understanding.

_I am the only one who can take down an archduke, and I will if I have to._

“Questionzz?” When no one offered any, she waved her hand. “All right, then. Carry on.”

“And what’s my task, then?” Dagon asked, looking more than usually toothsome as the dukes headed out. She reheated Beelzebub’s mug with a wave of her finger. “If I’m not running point on HOT, like I usually do, I mean.”

And there was that tone again.

“You’re getting me everything we’ve got on Mammon so we can review it. We’ve never tried to figure him out before. It’s time we did.

“And then, I’m going back to my rooms to finish what I started this morning.” Beelzebub prodded at her coffee mug. “It’s always like that, isn’t it? You wait thousands of years for something you want, and as soon as you’ve got it, something comes along to fuck it all up.”

“Yes. Yes, it does,” Dagon muttered before sailing out of the office.

“Just wonderful,” Beelzebub said to the empty room.

Enough was enough. As soon as Beelzebub got this Berith bullshit out of the way, she and Dagon were going to talk about what had happened this morning—and then about what was really eating at Dagon, because Beelzebub had a feeling that wasn’t the only problem here. 

With a sigh, Beelzebub scooted the phone closer, lifted the receiver, and dialed 666-5, the number that would put her through to Berith’s principal secretary—provided they hadn’t been discorporated recently, of course. Another of Berith’s bad habits that made staffing his court one of the most heavenly tasks on Beelzebub’s never-ending list.

_“Oh, so many sins on that long list of yours, pet.”_

Maybe she should call him to let him know she’d be a while. But would he even know to pick up the phone? Should she just say fuck it and go back down there to explain—

“Irascibia City, main tower. Ghroth the Harbinger speaking,” the perpetually harassed voice of Berith’s principal secretary cut off her thoughts. “And if you’re calling from Mammon’s court about the damage, you can stop already, because we kn—”

“It’s me, Ghroth.”

“Oh, Your Lowness! My apologies. As you may have suspected—”

“Oh, I did. Put me through to Berith, and I guarantee your day will get better.”

“Right away, Your Lowness!” 

_I’ll call Gabriel as soon as I’m finished with this conversation._

_He’ll understand. More than anyone in heaven or hell could, really._

_He had my job once. Not that long ago._

_Yes. He’ll understand._


	5. Chapter 5

Gabriel didn’t understand this. _Any_ of this.

He’d been lying beneath her. Shivering as she kissed him, nibbled along his neck, pulled and licked his nipples into painfully sharp points. Giving her everything she wanted, submitting to her every desire.

And then she was out the door after someone—

_Dagon. That scaly—_

_Charitable._

After Dagon (who God didn’t hate more than any other demon, by the way, oh no, not at all) had called with something that just couldn’t possibly fucking wait a—

 _Charitable. I_ must _be charitable._

And just like that, his master was gone. With some vague words about what he could and couldn’t do without her.

She didn’t even look back.

“Things come up all the time. That’s all this is.” There was a problem at the office. He knew all about those. How many of them had he dealt with over the last ten thousand years?

_None._

That wasn’t true, though. He’d handled many crises—

_Pretended to._

Gabriel shut his eyes and bit his lip.

It wasn’t even a little voice of doubt in his head. It was his own voice.

She didn’t even look back.

He bit harder.

_Charitable._

_Understanding._

_Charitable._

_Understanding._

_“Charity, understanding, endless patience. And….” Gabriel turned from the whiteboard back to the audience with his most brilliant smile. “…miracles. That’s what we do.”_

_He opened his arms in a gesture like a hug and smiled at the room of twenty-one archangels: three from each of heaven’s international branches—one lead archangel, two of their seconds._

_A smattering of applause. Polite smiles. Nods._

_Gabriel’s smile was brighter though. It had to be._

_He was their leader._

_(I know what I’m doing.)_

_It was his turn to host heaven’s quarterly conference._

_(Went off without a hitch.)_

_He’d said everything perfectly._

_(I practiced.)_

_They’d all nodded. Smiled back. Applauded. Smiled back. Smiled back._

_(I_ know _what I’m doing.)_

_No. It’s pretty fucking clear what really happened there._

And yes. Yes it was.

_Well, damn it, we both have—well, okay, had—the same damned jobs. Is that good enough for you?_

Silence.

Thank God.

“A problem at the office. That’s all.”

***

The hands of nearly every clock in Beelzebub’s open-plan bedroom were either frozen, or ticking and kicking defiantly like a human heart against its mortal end. But the one on top of the battered armoire clicked through what seemed to Gabriel like actual seconds.

After thirty minutes of them had ticked past, he didn’t want to listen to anything else he had to say to himself.

She’d given him permission to explore, so he climbed out of bed. The bars of the cock cage pressed into his flesh as he walked along the parts of her rooms that he had seen so far.

A few high-backed chairs. Wood scuffed and velveteen upholstery worn down to a network of threads.

The chess table. Set complete now. He picked up a red pawn and turned it over and over. Had she miracled up the rest? He shrugged and put it back down.

Armoire next. Ignoring the clock atop it, Gabriel tried the door, a little surprised when it opened. Was this a test? To see if he’d put clothes on without her approval?

But the rows of black, white, and red were clearly not for him. Morning dress. Tuxedos. Fall front trousers like those she’d worn yesterday. Stockings and knee breeches.

He ran his fingers along everything. Worn, but elegant. He leaned in closer and breathed in. Clove. Black pepper. Brimstone.

After that, it was into the unknown. A settee before a fireplace, the flames of which he avoided on instinct. But they threw enough light to his right and left that he could see the long hallways. Both led to room after room, each as shabbily elegant as the next.

Ballroom. Sitting rooms. Bedrooms. Morning rooms. Drawing rooms. Dining room—what did she eat there, and would he join her? An … office? He trailed his hand along the battered rolltop desk. What would she do here that she couldn’t do in her actual office? Was this just for show? Washroom—bathtub stained but surprisingly clean. Big enough for at least two corporations of his size and hers.

The idea of bathing her, on his knees, head bowed as he attended on her every demand.

The idea of her bathing him, ordering him to put out his wings for her inspection and pleasure?

What did her body look like beneath her uniforms? Would she let him see, permit him to touch—

His fingers banged against the bars of the cage.

_Oh. That’s right._

A conservatory looking out on darkness lit by a faint red glare.

How big _was_ this place?

As big as gluttony, he decided.

But not so big that he couldn’t return to the bedchamber quickly, and without getting lost.

The hands on the clock had only ticked through one more revolution.

Gabriel rolled his lower lip into his mouth and ran his hand through his hair. Frowned and did it again.

Of course. After what he’d been doing for the last day or so, it would be a mess, wouldn’t it?

“Oh, that’s not good.” She wouldn’t want to come back and see that he hadn’t cleaned himself up.

He hadn’t seen a mirror anywhere, though. Odd. Weren’t gluttony and vanity related?

“No. She’s anything but vain.”

_“Let’z add vanity to the list of your sins, hm?”_

He shook his head. “I just want to look….”

_Vain._

“Oh, fuck off!”

_No._

Anyway, he couldn’t miracle one up. Even if he hadn’t given up all power when he knelt at her feet, she’d forbidden him t—

_Why would she forbid me if I couldn’t?_

He ran a finger along the bars of the cage.

_And she only said I couldn’t use one to take this thing off._

Not knowing what to expect, he snapped his fingers at the armoire. The door swung open. A full length-mirror on the other side.

“Huh. Well I’ll be d—”

Maybe he was and he just didn’t know it.

The corporation looking back at him was really the only one he’d ever liked. Azir—the renegade—had been an “early adopter” of the idea of taking on human form. Oh, he’d practically jumped at the opportunity the moment God had offered it, really, and the rest of the heavenly host had joined him soon enough.

Gabriel, however, had been a “late adopter” to the program, much to his distress. He was, after all, supposed to _lead_ , not follow. But none of the seemingly endless bodies had interested him. The renegade’s was too soft, Michael and Uriel’s too spindly, Sandalphon’s too squat. No use copying, well, _taking inspiration_ from them, or from the rest of the host, either.

  
_“What troubles you about this, Herald Gabriel?”_

_“I don’t know, Lord.” He had never lied to Her and never would. But something lurked behind his answer; that not-knowing. Something he would glimpse and reach for, only to have it slip away._

_“Many of My angels have taken corporations; many have chosen not to. Yet you alone wish to do so but have not settled on one. You have an array of possibilities as limitless as humankind’s. Is that not enough?”_

_She wasn’t scolding, merely asking._

_She did that a lot. Back when She still talked to them._

_“No, Lord. I mean,” he hurried on, to clarify. “It is. And I want one that You have made for us. But I...._

_“I don’t know,” he finished softly._

_And they’d said no more about the issue._

_The next day, he’d found it. Among all the limitless possibilities, he’d found the one that felt as though it had been made for him._

And unlike some angels and demons, who changed their corporations as often as Gabriel changed his clothes, he had kept it ever since.

He touched it now.

Strong chest and abdomen. Perhaps a bit rounder than the style had been for the last few decades, but styles came and went. Strength did not.

Strong limbs. That looked fitting for an archangel who had deflected a demon’s spear right before it sliced through a comrade’s face, then hurled said demon from the stars.

_“You’re a lean, mean fighting machine.”_

A strong back. Firm buttocks. A cock—

Well. That had taken a few tries, admittedly.

He’d only ever made one improvement. Green eyes didn’t go with a cool-winter complexion, or with the colors that flattered it. 

Maybe violet eyes just weren’t her preference?

Or was it the face?

No. His hair was a complete mess. That had to be it.

Gabriel ran his hand through it, miracling each strand back into order.

_Vain._

No.

_Charitable._

_Understanding._

_Charitable._

***

Lying on the lumpy mattress, Gabriel had followed the journey of both hands on the clock through two revolutions. Likewise, his emotions had gone through a variety of revolutions.

Shortly after Beelzebub’s departure, he’d watched the door feeling twitchy and light all over, for she’d said she’d be back soon.

 _Joyful expectation_. That was one feeling he knew. After all, the Lord had invented it and granted it to Her angels. But “joyful expectation” wasn’t quite right here. His aching, caged cock suggested that sexual expectation was part of it too.

But five hours later, that feeling had changed. It felt hotter, twitchier, but not in the same joyful way. That one he knew: irritation. He’d felt that many times—with the Earth Observation Team for losing track of lower-ranking angels’ movements; with subordinates who misplaced or misfiled paperwork; hell, even with Sandalphon’s blathering about pornography and Michael’s—well, whatever that little smile-thing they did that made him feel confused and angry.

And angry was what he felt one-and-a-half revolutions later. But only for a moment.

_Something must have happened to keep her away this long._

Work. Work was always the thing, wasn’t it? Just when you thought you were finished, there was more.

_But she promised. That I would kneel beside her desk as she worked. Head bowed._

After that, he felt as though he was lost in a fog.

It wasn’t just being left here like some … some _some_ thing. Though that had made him feel … well, a lot like he did when Michael did that smile-thing. But also something that felt a lot like the desires he’d pushed to the back of his mind. That seem twitchy feeling that made him sweat, even though his corporation lacked the ability to do that.

Twitchy.

Uncomfortable.

Itchy around the eyes.

And then just….

Like he had when meetings in heaven just … lasted.

He was not used to any of this.

Or just how hot his anger was running.

Damn it, this, this whole thing she and he were doing. It wasn’t supposed to be this way! It was supposed to be _theirs_.

“Come off!” he hissed at the cage for the twentieth time since Beelzebub had left (and he’d counted). “Damn it, come. Off.”

If he wasn’t good enough for her to pay any fucking attention to, then damn it, he should be able to pay attention to himself!

But no matter if he tapped the lock, nudged it, or pressed the pads of his fingers against it, her sigil only shocked his fingers. For several minutes after, it glowed at him like hot coals in a fireplace Like it was saying, _No, you’re not. No you’re not_.

The pillows, however, didn’t mock him. So Gabriel threw two of them across the room.

After all, they were called _throw pillows_ , weren’t they?

His fingernails dug into the duvet hard enough to shred it.

Was this what hellfire felt like when it consumed you? Either way, it burned and burned until nothing was left but coals that slowly sputtered into smoke.

And that smoke became heavier and heavier, creeping up from the center his chest, down his arms, through his throat, and finally into his head, then eyes.

Gabriel closed them with a huff and curled onto her side of the bed.

He fell asleep to the smells of clove, brimstone, and everything else that was her.


	6. Chapter 6

Persuading Berith to give up his turn to host had been easier than tempting a child to steal a piece of candy. In fact, he was happier than she’d seen him since he invented the swear word _ass nugget_.

Which, she suspected, he’d invented solely to use when talking about or to Mammon.

“If that little dickspittling _ass nugget_ starts mouth-farting on about whatever new ‘improvements’ he’s made to that rhinestone-bedazzled pissing _shit_ hole city of his, Lowness, then _Satan fucking help me_ , but I’m _tossing him through that fuck-ugly, cumstained, shitty window this time_. Don’t think I won’t.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Beelzebub said, knowing that Berith wasn’t listening to anything but himself right now.

What followed was a fifteen-minute, near-incoherent diatribe around one equally incoherent theme: how Mammon deserved to be dropped into a dunk tank filled with the holiest of holy water and a school of irradiated piranhas—and subjected to various other punishments that made even Beelzebub feel a little bit unnerved.

He then spent another five minutes just screaming at Ghroth for no apparent reason while thinking he’d put Beelzebub on Mute (or given that this was the archduke of Wrath she was talking to, perhaps that was being overly charitable). Even though all of the working clocks in Beelzebub’s office showed the wrong time everywhere in heaven, earth, and hell, she could still use them to count down the minutes. For what felt like the five-billionth time in her reign, she wished to the ninth circle of hell that she could just hang up and let Berith shout himself silly, but that would only make him turn his wrath to every one of his underlings he could snap his carnivorous jaws around. And Satan’s balls, she had a hard enough time keeping his court fully staffed as it was with the way he went through demons.

“—with a fucking rusty gravy boat filled with gonorrhea and _syphilis_ ,” Berith finished at last.

Yes, this was the happiest and calmest she’d ever seen him.

“Right,” Beelzebub said as though she hadn’t just listened to a ten-thousand-year-old former cherub throw a tantrum over being mildly inconvenienced by a demon universally known as an _ass nugget_. “We’ll put you back into the regular rotation. You won’t be hosting until the conference after mine.” That was the way these meetings cycled: the biannual conference at head office marked the beginning of a new cycle, as that particular conference lasted a week rather than the typical three days. It was also filled with more disorderly demonic behavior than usual, along with enough disorderly yearly reports and other assorted paperwork that Dagon was in a shitty mood for the month before and after it.

“Fucking lovely,” Berith growled before hanging up.

“You have a nice day now,” Beelzebub drawled as she put the phone back in its cradle and leaned back in her rickety chair, propped her feet up on her desk, and sighed as she rubbed at her temples. “Satan forbid you don’t.”

Demons weren’t supposed to get headaches, _and yet_.

“Dagon? Coffee, please. With the biggest bowl of scabies and grubs we’ve got.” Because fuck it, she was the archduke of gluttony and she was going to eat her frustration.

From across the room, Dagon grumbled something Beelzebub couldn’t make out before pushing back in her chair and heading out of the room.

 _Yup. Fucking_ lovely _._

She didn’t have any more patience for her shitty attitude today.

“What’s the problem?” she asked as Dagon strode back in with the coffee tray and a bowl of squirming insects.

“Fucking conference.” Dagon put the tray on the desk. “Not just this clusterfuck, but the one we’re supposed to be preparing for. The one in a week, remember that?”

Dagon was a master of many sins—wrath (but not the annoying kind), pride (but not the useless kind), greed (but not the oily Mammon kind), pettiness (but the fun kind), and efficiency (which, really, could’ve been a sin _or_ a virtue, depending on how you looked at it). But she seemed constitutionally incapable of disobedience (but not to God) and deceit.

_At least not to me._

“You’re not a liar, Misery Maven.”

Dagon held up a hand toward her. “Not today. Okay? Please?”

Hearing the word _please_ twice in one day was more than a little shocking. But when Mammon had used it, it sounded like unrefined bullshit. When Dagon used it, though, she was always sincere.

Which was dangerously close to a virtue. And maybe Beelzebub was being close to virtuous in dropping the matter instead of prodding at her. But, well—

She was Dagon, after all.

“Okay,” Beelzebub said as she drew the squirming bowl toward her. “Tomorrow, though. Even if your attitude is less shitty.”

Her misery maven or not, her Dagon or not, Beelzebub wasn’t going to shrug off this bullshit any longer.

Dagon sighed. “Okay.”

And then she took a too-large swig of miracled-hot coffee and dug her pencil back into the paper in front of her.

Beelzebub shook her head and spooned up a mouthful of bugs.

Dagon sighed. “It’s just that—”

“Yes?” Beelzebub looked up just in time to see Dagon glance away with something like envy in her eyes.

And that? That was worrisome. Because envy was not among the many sins Dagon excelled at. In fact, Beelzebub would have said she was allergic to it, if demons could have such things as allergies. She’d never once wanted anything but the job she had. And while she detested Mammon, she wouldn’t even take Leviathan’s calls unless Beelzebub was absolutely unavailable and would not be available for more than two hours.

She must have been mistaken. The stress of the day must be getting to her—and it felt like it hadn’t even begun.

“No. Forget it. Tomorrow,” Dagon said without meeting her gaze.

The rest of the day ground on, but at least now it was punctuated with their usual banter. Which, really, was the only thing that kept Beelzebub from throwing something through the next demon who came to her with a problem.

First there was the matter of Leviathan to handle, and as always the duke of Envy was at the top of their game today, meaning that five minutes into the conversation, Beelzebub was ready to miracle herself over to the City of Invidium to throttle them personally. But she had to put her frustration with the duke of Envy aside, as the conference was a mere week away and this particular host needed more than a little finessing to handle, thanks to their ocean-deep inferiority complex and their equally vast obsession with one-upsmanship. While the duke of Envy wasn’t an irritant like Mammon or a hotspur like Berith, they were an oversensitive, passive-aggressive, dreary bore who slowly drained their equally dreary conference room of all energy. Even Berith was too tired to so much as offer more than a few half-hearted profanities after the third day. As Leviathan, Beelzebub wondered for the countless time if the archduke hadn’t appropriated some vampiric traits over the millennia. It would certainly explain why she always felt like she needed an entire box of chocolates, a glass of wine, and a long soak in a bathtub after any prolonged contact with them.

No sooner had she rung off and resolved to call Gabriel than Hastur had entered her office looking completely put out.

“Room twelve’s on fire again, and this time it wasn’t my fault. It’s the gremlins again.”

No one was exactly sure where the blessed little spiked-back had come from, but after centuries of dealing with the infestation, three things were certain: despite looking like some of hell’s less-comely residents, they weren’t demons; they showed up at the worst possible times; and they got into everything remotely related to fire, electricity, machinery, or anything else that would be an absolute clusterfuck to deal with after they’d had their fun with it.

Whether or not Satan had created them in a particularly nasty fit of pique—well, the infernal jury was still out on that one.

By the time Fire Control had salvaged what they could of the room, the swarm had moved on to room nine, then proceeded to lead the team of increasingly brassed-off demons on a merry chase through hell’s conference rooms.

As Beelzebub listened to the team’s latest update on the damage, Dagon had had to reschedule a conference call with head office’s new team of field agents, none of whom were best pleased about the delay.

“Well, take a number,” Beelzebub snapped before dismissing their leader. And the fact her former field agent, the traitor, had been the one to teach her that particular term had been the real icing on the fucking cake.

Which was also a term he’d taught her.

Which meant today was well and truly bunged up.

Finally, the catastrophes quieted down enough that Beelzebub could truly feel that a headache was coming on. And after the day she’d had, she figured she deserved to feel one.

“Boss?”

Beelzebub looked up from her half-empty coffee mug. Was it the fifth one today? The twenty-fifth? Did it even matter when you only drank coffee for the taste? “Yezz?”

“Your flies are….” Dagon circled her hand in the air.

“Hm?” Beelzebub looked to her left, frowned, then looked to her right. Half of her flies had settled onto their backs, their buzzing soft and tinny. The other half were valiantly trying to circle her head, and just as valiantly failing little by little.

“Oh. They’re fine,” Beelzebub said with a wave of her own. “You’ve zzeen them zzzleep before.”

Why they did that, or why any demon’s familiars did, was just one of those things demons had yet to figure out about, well, being demons.

But in her case, Beelzebub thought, feeling just a little bit tired at the end of a long day made sense. She had few pleasures in her existence, which was practically painful for a gluttony demon.

That was the downside of having a dual role. The prince of hell couldn’t have a weakness like that. But the archduke of Gluttony had to embody that sin…which meant sleep was something that was practically something that she needed or she wouldn’t need to need it and then that would be something she didn’t need and then that would be something….

Something that was shaking her shoulder.

“Go to bed, boss. I’ve got it from here.”

Beelzebub tried to protest, but somehow the word sounded line “hgngszzz.”

“Now, see? You’re buzzing all over the place,” Dagon chided as she squeezed Beelzebub’s shoulder harder. “Go be gluttonous for a while.”

She shouldn’t, but…. Gabriel.

_Fuck. I didn’t call him. Didn’t even tell him he could answer the phone if…._

She didn’t yawn much, but years of sleep had given her the reflex. And when she was particularly tired, it just sort of happened.

“If anyone callzzzz me…tell them to get fucked,” she said as she hauled herself to her feet. “Unlezzz it’s Azzmodeuzzz. They’ll juzzt take it literally, then tell uzzz all about it.”

“Mh-hm,” Dagon said, patting her back and returning to her table. “Go the fuck to sleep, boss.”  
  
“Ghgh,” Beelzebub agreed as she opened the door and wobbled through it, followed by her equally wobbly flies.  
  
The walk back to her room re-enervated her somewhat, if only because she needed to pay attention to navigate the crowded hallways without knocking over their stumbling occupants. And seeing their prince shambling right along with them wouldn’t do at all. Especially when her usual stern but disinterested expression probably looked more like a very, very tired one.

Thank Satan that she reached the door to her rooms before she yawned again. Her hands only fumbled once as she pushed it open.


	7. Chapter 7

He must have slept again, because he didn’t remember anything until the rattle of the door latch startled him upright.

It swung open on Beelzebub. But one he had never seen before.

No imperial scowl, no soldier-straight back, no strides that said she knew where she was going and what she would do when she got there.

No warmth, either like that thrown from the fireplace or the kind he had seen in her blue eyes when he lay in her arms.

Instead: slumped shoulders, slower steps, and a pallor that made the burns on her face even redder and angrier.

 _Tired_. Hell knew where that word had come from, but he knew it was the right one.

“Beelzebub,” he started.

“What did I tell you about that?” Her voice grated as she shoved the door shut with her foot.

And that heaviness got worse.

“Master,” he corrected. “Sorry, Master.” He lowered his head.

Less than twenty-four hours here and he’d already fucked up.

“Hmhn.” Her low-heeled shoes clacked across the scuffed wooden floor, then clattered, as though they were bouncing and rolling against it.

“Master—”

“Did I say you could talk?”

His face chilled at the thorns in her voice.

“No, Mas—”

“So stop talking.”

His face chilled more.

She hadn’t told him to keep his head down, though, so he inched it upward.

Beelzebub had crossed the room to the chaise longue in front of the fireplace, her back to him. He watched, head still up, as she pulled the scorched red sash over her head and tossed it over the chaise’s back. Her hands fiddled about her neck, then her tie sailed over the edge and onto the seat beyond. The thick little clunk that followed told him that her medals had joined it.

Her jacket did next, revealing a long vest of mesh, which she yanked over her head and similarly discarded over he chaise’s back, leaving him looking at the dingy long-sleeved shirt beneath, frayed at the collar and singed in places.

With a sigh, she turned to him, and his anger cooled slightly. Her shirt was too large for her, but it didn’t hide the curve of her small breasts, or the slight points of her nipples. Another sigh as she unfastened the button on her collar, the one beneath, the one beneath, showing off just a hint of their swell.

Oh, how his cock wanted to break out of its cage and let her see it too.

A little groan of something like frustration as she shut her eyes and ran her hands through her messy black hair. The movement did nothing to tame it, but she did open her eyes then. When she did, they looked softer.

“Work,” she explained as she padded across the floor, her mesh stockings still on her feet. “Don’t know if you know thizz, but we—the archdukes and I, that is—meet quarterly to discuss hell’s … businezz. That izz what we’re preparing for all day.”

Oh.

And now the chill in his cheeks turned to heat.

He should have known it was important. _Actually_ important. 

Nothing to get so angry about.

_Charitable._

_Understanding._

“May I spe—”

“Yezz. Of course.”

“We have the same meetings. In heaven,” he added, then winced internally. Of course she knew that. Where else would…? “Quarterly. At, um, each of heaven’s offices.”

“Mh.” Beelzebub nodded as she climbed onto the bed’s left side. “It’zzz … exhausting. Makezz you want to sleep. Even if you don’t need to.” She tried to offer him a smile, but it looked just as tired as she felt, somehow. Even her flies drooped in their circles around her head. Like they’d breathed in smoke. Maybe that was why she was buzzing more than usual.

One by one, they left their orbit around her head and settled around the room.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Mh.” She turned her gaze to the black cage around his cock. “Guezz you want thizz off.”

“Yeah.”

Nodding, Beelzebub pressed her thumb against the sigil. This time, its curves and lines ignited with white light before the lock clicked open. Beelzebub placed it on the nightstand with before disconnecting the cage from the ring and sliding both down his flaccid cock.

Gabriel stifled a moan as something warm rushed through it, reminding him of the sip of water he’d taken when he was lying in her arms last night.

“Were you a good boy?” Her voice dragged past her chapped lips, but the look in her eyes was still soft.

“Yes, Master. Well—”

“Mh-hm. Tried to open it, didn’t you?” She tapped the fingertips on his right hand. “Bad angel. Told you that wouldn’t work.” She raised his hand and kissed each finger slowly. “We’ll break you of that habit.”

“Yes, Master.”

His cock was taking interest again, and Beelzebub’s gaze flicked toward it.

“No, pet. Not tonight,” she said as she turned onto her side and raised her arm. “Come here.”

Well. He would have liked her to touch it. To have touched hers—even put it in his mouth.

But work.

He understood. What it did. Even to beings who should be indefatigable.

He scooted into her embrace.

“Closer.”

When she patted her shoulder, he nestled his head against it and draped an arm around her in return.

“Zzleep,” she murmured. “More work tomorrow. So … zzzleep now.”

“Yes, Master.”

But she was already still and silent.

Apparently, that was what was what sleep meant.

You didn’t answer.

Just like when she was awake.

But that was uncharitable.

_Work._

Yes.

He wasn’t uncharitable.

But the hands on the clock circumnavigated its face two more times before his cock had softened enough to let him join her.


	8. Chapter 8

The next three—four?—days were one long blur of work, lukewarm coffee, a flurry of phone calls, another fire in room twelve—this one also not Hastur-related—and more lukewarm coffee. Thanks to the chaotic nonsense of the past day, head office was behind on preparations, which made its atmosphere even gloomier, tenser, and far more hectic.

It was the kind of barely controlled chaos Beelzebub despised, but the kind in which she often lived, nonetheless. And so she pressed on, knuckled down, and kept her upper lip stiff and her expression somewhere between stern and exasperated. Just as she had done for ten thousand years.

One of the many things necessary to keep this chaos at least somewhat controlled was the need for Beelzebub and Dagon to work as though they were two demons sharing one body and one mind. They had no time and no room for error to risk doing anything else.

This also meant they didn’t have time for any difficult conversations that had nothing to do with head office making a good show at this meeting while keeping Berith and Mammon from discorporating each other, while Asmodeus got off watching them spar, while Leviathan goaded all three archdukes on with whispers, innuendo, and rumor just because they could, and because the sin of envy turned everyone who dealt with it into a miserable sack of shit.

Beelzebub tried her best to keep Gabriel updated about when she expected to return to her rooms. He knew he had permission to answer the telephone and to ask for specific times and details. Unfortunately, Beelzebub never had any to give him. Head office was fast approaching the hardest of all hard deadlines, which meant that everything changed from minute to minute, and all of those minutes were the last minute.

And Beelzebub jumped from one of them to the next, from fire to fire, putting out one just as another one ignited, always with Dagon jumping with her, minute to minute, fire to fire. If demons could feel gratitude….

Fuck it. She felt it, whether or not she was supposed to.

Just like she felt exhausted after … thirty-six? Forty eight? Fifty hours of nonstop work? Fifty-two. Yes. Maybe? Well, exhausted after however many hours, even though she wasn’t supposed to feel that, either.

“You’re going to bed,” Dagon insisted when Beelzebub clipped her shoulder on a filing cabinet, nearly spilling an armful of papers all over the floor, which Dagon barely caught.

“No,” Beelzebub said. “Fucking thing juzzt moved right in front of me. Probably gremlinzz again.”

“Except gremlins don’t move furniture and office equipment, and you blessed well know that.”

“Haven’t you heard of evolution?” Beelzebub mumbled. “I know. Hastur and Ligur made it up as a joke on the Victorianz after too many spiritualistzz summoned them while trying to talk to dead unclezzz or….” She snorted, waving her hand. “Who knew they were right—well. Maybe only a little right.”

“Yeah, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Dagon said, taking her shoulders and turning her toward the door. “Go on. Before you collapse.”

It was all her own blessed fault, Beelzebub thought as she forced herself toward her rooms. If she hadn’t gotten so used to sleeping, eating, and fucking like some out-of-control—

Gluttony was really not suited to leadership, she decided as she tugged open the door to her rooms.

Yet here she was. And that was that.  
  
***

That was that.

The phone rang once or twice each day. Three times, if he was lucky.

Each time an update punctuated with an _I should be back…_ , _I think I’ll be back…_ , _We’ve run into a problem_ …, _I don’t know_ …

“I don’t know, pet.”

 _Lucky_.

Well, fuck that, then.

The bars of the cage pressed against his cock as he explored her rooms. The expansive but dusty ballroom with its high, cobwebbed ceilings.

( _Demons dance. Why does it look like no one ever has in here?_ )

The dustless office with its scuffed wood and orderly furniture.

( _Why does she need this?_ )

The bathroom with that wide tub, in which he settled his naked body

( _I want to be here._ )

Gabriel had given up on trying to escape the cage. But that didn’t mean he was caged in other ways.

Eyes closed, he brushed his fingers up his thighs, imagining her caresses. Ground his rear against the edge of the tub. Pinched his nipples hard enough to make himself scream.

His cock pressed against the bars until it was one long, painful ache.

Better that, though, than paying attention to the phone that never rang with good news.

_Charitable._

_Understanding._

_I’m tired of being both._

***

Tired.

And she didn’t want to be.

Not with Gabriel lying beside her, so gloriously naked and submissive, his cock caged and just as desperate for release as its owner was. Not with him trying as hard as an angel could try to tempt her right from the moment she walked through the door—legs splayed out to show her everything he had; on hands and knees, offering up his flawless, muscular rear; lying on his side trying to look sensual and sophisticated, but only looking a bit clumsy and unsure of himself. Which only made him even more arousing to look at.

She wanted to. Satan knew she wanted to bury herself inside him and rut until her fatigue vanished. To pull his hair as she thrust into him, making him scream with frustration and pleasure. To throw him on his back and show him—

“You know you can still feel good when you’re in that cage, yezz?” she asked what felt like three—four?—nights later as he curled into her embrace.

“No, Master. I didn’t know that.”

It wasn’t his usual demure reply. He sounded tired too. More than tired. Maybe…?

“Pouty.” She slapped his arse, and oh did that bratty little pout turn into a moan as she swept her finger between the cleft. “Do you know what I do to pouty little angelzzz?”

“No, Master.”

“Mh, bet you’d like to,” she murmured as she pulled him in closer. “Bet you’d like me to put my cock in you right now…and….”  
  
***

And?

Gabriel waited for the rest of the sentence. “Master?” he asked when none came.

Beelzebub responded with a sleepy buzz and wrapped her arms around him even tighter.

Gabriel shut his eyes and swallowed.

_It’s work. Just work._

_Charitable._

_Understanding._

_Charitable._

_Understanding._

But it wasn’t working tonight. Really, it hadn’t worked all day.

“I’m just as tired as you are.”

He bit his lip, but when she only slept on, more words came out.

“I’m just so tired. If you don’t want me, why did you bring me here?”

He closed his eyes.

“If you don’t want me, was this all for nothing? All of it?”

Once again, he didn’t sleep.

***

Sleep was for humans and for the dead.

And as she was neither, Beelzebub pressed on.

She needed this to be over.

She needed her angel.

  
***

He didn’t know how much longer he could press on like this.

Hugging her pillow to him, Gabriel breathed in her scent.

He needed this to be over.

He needed his master.

***

And then one morning, it simply was over.

Beelzebub could tell as soon as she stepped into her office.

Whenever Hastur and Ligur were waiting in front of your desk first thing in the morning looking positively giddy, you knew something big had happened. And when Dagon was smiling—not smiling like she was about to rip out a few throats, but actually _smiling_ —you knew that “something” was very big indeed.

“All right.” Beelzebub said. “The fact you three dissolutes’ve got sunshine leaking out your arseholes tells me one of two things. Either Archduke Leviathan has postponed the conference because they’re having a sulk again, or the entire Court of Envy has simply vanished with no explanation. Unfortunately, I’m guessing it’s not the second, because none of us down here could ever be that lucky.”

“It’s better than that, boss.” Hastur didn’t usually interrupt Beelzebub unless she was really excited about something. And the fact that she was twitching all over meant she was more excited than Beelzebub had seen her in centuries. “We finished it!”

“Finished what?” Beelzebub frowned. That couldn’t mean what she thought it did.

“The _paperwork_ ,” Dagon explained, looking like pure sunshine incarnate now. If she got any happier, she’d probably sprout a fistful of white wings and Rise right through the ceiling.

And that meant—

Paperwork was not only finished, but finished to Dagon’s impossibly exacting standards. Which meant—

“For the conference.” Ligur nodded as she looked toward him. “Yeah. It is, boss. Put all hands in our department on it that weren’t handling crucial temptations. And a few hands from a few other departments that didn’t seem to be doin’ anything special.”

“Idle hands make the devil’s work,” Hastur agreed. “So we just put ’em to work.”

Beelzebub didn’t realize her mouth was hanging open until one of her flies nudged against a corner of it. “I didn’t order that,” she said. “I didn’t order any of that.”

“Didn’t exactly not order it, though, did you, boss?” Hastur said with a wink.

Beelzebub thought of reprimanding her—of reprimanding all of them. The work was done. She wouldn’t complain about that. But going behind her back like this—

“ _I_ was the one that gave the order,” Dagon said, before Beelzebub could speak again. “They followed it. Just like demons are supposed to do when they get an order from someone who outranks them. And as your principal secretary, I’ve got jurisdiction over all the paperwork, filing, and other—how’d you put it all those years ago?”

“‘Secretary things,’” Beelzebub murmured. “But—”

“No.” Dagon shook her head as she held up her hand, palm out. “This was a secretary thing if ever there was. Putting these two and their staff on the job, rather than just our own, means we’re done three days early, which means we won’t be going into this meeting feeling like we’re already on the defensive. It was such an easy fix,” she said, looking from Hastur to Ligur. “All those years … can’t believe I didn’t see what was right in front of me….”

“Sometimes you’ve got to step back from a thing to see the full picture,” Ligur said with a smile.

“Or eat one of those CEO types and his staff, then look through their computers because you wanted to find out why they had those funny blinking lights.” Hastur shrugged as Lily moved an arm to get a better grip on her head. “Looks like humans’ve got some ideas about ‘delegating tasks.”

“They seemed like they’d work pretty good down here,” Ligur agreed, wrapping an arm around Hastur’s waist and squeezing her hip.

“Course, then we smashed ’em all with those baseball bats we found last week, then set the building on fire.” Hastur grinned at them like she deserved the Employee of the Millennium Award.

Beelzebub could only nod meekly. Something about this whole situation, though….

Sure, Hastur and Ligur were the most creative of demons when it came to finding humans to tempt, and collecting the souls of the tempted when they inevitably damned themselves. They were also creative when it came to sex. Anyone in head office who paid the slightest bit of attention—and plenty of demons who didn’t want to—knew that the two could rival plenty of incubi and succubae in finding new and ingenious ways to fuck.

But Hastur having a look through a computer when her grasp on the fact they existed was still shaky at best…

And Ligur getting an idea from what they found inside it….

And office-proud Dagon actually accepting that idea….

Well. There was something about it all. But right now, frankly, Beelzebub was just too tired and relieved to wonder about what that something could be. Like all of hell’s less-pressing issues, it would have to wait its turn.

“I….” Her gaze moved from one demon to the other. “I don’t….” She bit her lower lip and nodded again.

The word she wanted to say was probably the least demonic thing a demon could say. Right up there with _please_. Which wasn’t exactly unheard of lately, given that Dagon herself had used it.

So she just went with it.

“Thank you.” She nodded to her dukes, then to Dagon. “That really was a hell of a job, you three.”

Their smiles were nearly blinding, and _really_!

“All right. Enough of that,” she said, clapping her hands sharply. “Any more of this bullshit and we might as well just change our name to _the heaven annex_ and start holding breakout sezzions and trust falls and whatever the fuck that nonsense they do Upstairs is. Carry on.”

Hastur and Ligur bowed to her, then slipped out the door, shutting it behind them.

“Oh don’t give me that look,” Dagon said, putting her hands on her hips as Beelzebub turned and walked toward her. “You know blessed well I had every right to make that call.”

“Yes, I do.”

Dagon’s head whipped back as her ghost-blue eyes widened. “Um, well. Okay, then,” she fumbled.

“But what I don’t know blessed well is why you did. And why you let Hastur and Ligur in on it.”

“Well, that’s obvious, boss. You’ve been so tir—”

“I’ve handled being tired just fine before.” A few of her flies chittered in equal annoyance.

“But should you have to?”

“I’m your _leader_!”

“Yes, and?”

“I’m not some stupid, _useless_ little gluttony demon that can’t put her back into things when—”

“Yes, my prince. We know. And no one thinks you are.”

Beelzebub ran a hand through her hair, nearly knocking a few flies off their course. “You don’t get to call me that,” she grumbled. “Not when I’m not best pleazzed with you.”

Dagon lowered her hands from her hips and crossed the room. “Boss, do you know why there’ve never been any plots to overthrow you? Why no archduke has ever challenged you for your job?”

“Because none of them want to do it.” Beelzebub waved her hand, gesturing around her office. “They’d rather rule over their own shiny little courts than sit here, day after day—”

“That’s right.” Dagon nodded. “But that’s only part of it. They don’t want it because they can’t do it. And they all know that. Even Belial. And if the archduke of Pride doesn’t think they can handle what you do….” She put her hands on Beelzebub’s shoulders and squeezed them.

“Anyway,” she went on. “Gluttony demons eat. And drink. And sometimes, they even sleep. That’s who they are. That’s what they do. If Berith stopped screaming at everything, and if Leviathan stopped trying to stab everyone in the back, you’d be worried. Admit it. You would be. So why doesn’t the archduke of Gluttony get to indulge?” Her smile sharpened, revealing more of her silvery teeth. “And why doesn’t the archduke of Gluttony get to _fuck_?”

“I’m not even going to pretend I know what you’re talking about.”

Dagon slid her hands away. “And that would be why we needed to talk in the first place.”

Beelzebub must have been so tired from the last … however long they’d been at this entire mess … that she was starting to mishear things. “What?”

“That talk we were supposed to have.” Dagon was not in the habit of murmuring, or looking doubtful. The surprise of her doing both was enough to shove the memory right back into Beelzebub’s mind.

“I forgot that,” Beelzebub admitted.

“Only because I let you.”

And if Beelzebub hadn’t already been wide awake from the surprises this morning had brought, that would have been enough to do the trick.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think so. I also think I’m going to need a lot of coffee before we do.”

And there was Dagon’s usual smirk again. “And I think that’s a capital idea.”  
  
***

If Hastur and Ligur hadn’t proven themselves to be invaluable and indispensable dukes on countless occasions, their combined efforts in getting the executive suite’s coffeemaker fixed would have been more than enough to make them so.

The fact they had discorporated no less than ten demons to get the job done—well, Beelzebub was just going to ignore that little fact.

After taking a sip of coffee that needed no miracling to be properly hot, Dagon licked at her chapped lips and ran both of them through her teeth.

“I need to ask you a favor.” Her voice was quiet again, and her tone one of supplication.

Beelzebub nodded as she put aside her own empty mug. But Dagon’s behavior was starting to make her worry.

The sip Dagon took was bigger this time. “I need you to just let me talk. Until I’m finished. And then you can ask me anything you want.” She chuckled, but Beelzebub had never heard a more humorless one. “If you still want to keep me around afterward, that is.”

“And why wouldn’t I?”

“Will you? Please?”

 _Please_ and _thank you_ being uttered in the prince of hell’s office twice in one hour. A lot of nevers were becoming hardly-evers this morning, it seemed. “Yes. All right.”

Dagon nodded and took a third sip before placing her coffee cup on top of Beelzebub’s desk, then sitting forward in the chair she had pulled up to it. “I don’t like Archangel Gabriel. I’m not finished yet.” She held up her hand as Beelzebub opened her mouth. “I don’t, boss. I’ve always thought he was fussy, stuck-up, superficial, and vain—something no self-respecting demon has any time for these days, I might add. He was a terrible leader, an even worse administrator, and an _incredibly_ irritating ethereal to liaise with. Really, I’m shocked it took this long for his staff to either figure all of that out or to actually do something about it. Michael should have been running things right from the start.”

She took a breath and reached for her mug.

“I don’t like him,” she said, her gaze on her finger as she circled it along the rim. “And that doesn’t matter a fig. He may not’ve been the best leader, maybe not even someone who should’ve been promoted that high up. But he’s good for you. Really.” She took another breath she didn’t need and finally raised her eyes to look at Beelzebub. “And I’ve been very jealous of that.”

Even if she hadn’t promised to stay quiet until Dagon was finished, Beelzebub wouldn’t have known what to say to that.

“Because it’s been just the four of us here, hasn’t it?” Dagon went on. “Even before ‘here’ was head office, not just a bunch of newly fallen angels who didn’t know why they didn’t get what they’d been promised and were right pissed off about it. You, me, Hastur, and Ligur. We put our heads together and we got it sorted. Figured out who should run what and who should go where, what the workflow should be and why it should be that way. It’s head office now because _we_ made it head office. Just the four of us.

“Except now, it’s not four of us anymore. It’s five. And if that fifth were a demon, I’d—well, I wouldn’t like it. Not at first, anyway. But I’d get there. But Gabriel’s not a demon, is he?” She glanced at the mug as if suddenly remembering she’d been holding it and why, then raised it to her lips and took a swallow.

“I thought this whole thing was just going to be one big game. Something Michael and you three cooked up so heaven could have a peaceful transfer of power and you, well.” She coughed. “You and he could finally stop circling each other like you’ve always done and just….” She shrugged.

“And now, today, I don’t really know what I was thinking there. Maybe I didn’t even know then. And I should have. You asking me, ‘Should I really do this?’, ‘Do you think he’ll really want this?’, and me knowing exactly what you planned on doing with him. Maybe I even thought it was all just some big joke. Like the time Hastur tried to convince me that humans really did eat something called ‘soylent green,’ and wouldn’t I just like to try some that she’d brought straight back from the butcher’s shop?” She shook her head. “Maybe I’m just really good at lying to myself. Like I said, boss. I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking then. Except that when I saw you both the next morning—him kneeling all but naked at your feet, you looking as pleased and regal as you did the day our master coronated you. Well. I knew then it wasn’t just some joke, some game you two wanted to play out until you were both bored of it. So I tried to be funny. Tried to let him know he was welcome here. That I thought he’d make a fine consort.”

Beelzebub had to remind herself that she’d agreed not to interrupt. Consort? What the heaven was Dagon on about with that?

“But then, you told me to hold your calls,” Dagon went on before Beelzebub could really turn that thought over. “That you were going to spend the day with him. In ten thousand years, boss, I can’t remember a day you weren’t at work. And then, you really weren’t here.” She took another breath, then laughed mirthlessly. “I was almost grateful when Mammon rung and started playing silly buggers, and then when the bullshit didn’t stop for the rest of the day. Then, the next morning, there you were, and things were back to normal again. I figured you were either going to realize that this arrangement just wasn’t going to work and tell Gabriel to fuck off back Upstairs, or that you were just going to keep him around in your rooms to play with when it suit you. Just another of those toys you’ve collected over the years.

“Except things weren’t back to normal. You looked … not upset, mind you, but unhappy. And not in the way you put on; not even in the way that everyone down here’s always unhappy. You looked the real thing, and it just got worse after that. I’d never seen you so tired. So miserable. Never seen you not just wanting sleep, but actually needing it. It scared me.”

Until now, Beelzebub had never imagined that Dagon could be scared of anything.

“You see, it’s because there’s never been anyone between you and me. Not in here. And now that there was, I didn’t know what to do about it. Except I knew that you needed him, and that, if I really was the demon I thought I was, that you thought I was, then I had to let you have him.

“That’s why I told Hastur and Ligur to stop whatever they were doing and give me ideas on how we could all finish this prep work so you could have that time off you wanted—that you needed.” Her chuckle was a bit more genuine now. “Never thought those two’d give me computers and the human workflows on them as a possibility, of all things, but at least the arson was familiar.

“So, no. I don’t like your archangel,” Dagon said as she met Beelzebub’s eyes. “I don’t know if that’ll ever change, boss. But I know that you can’t force liking someone any more than you can force wanting them, or desiring, them, or—” She tapped her fingers on the desk and pursed her lips, nodding. “Or any more than you can force yourself not to want them. But whether I like him or not, he’s here to stay. He’s the fifth now. Part of a workflow that I’m not going to try to change or even fuss about. Because it’s working. And I’m not the kind of demon who tries to fix things that don’t need fixing.” Her smile was almost back to genuine. “Because who has the time for that, right?”

Dagon nodded slightly, a sure sign that she was almost ready to yield the conversation and was making sure that she’d said everything she needed to. And then she nodded more firmly.

“But if you and he are going to get up to anything extracurricular in this office, all I ask is please, please, _please_ keep it in here and don’t treat the entire floor like your personal sex dungeon, yeah? Two ethereals are already doing that, and that’s about five too many.

“Okay, boss. I’m done now. And if you’re going to discorporate me for insubordination, then at least wait until after this conference is over. Everyone needs their principal secretary then.”

When Dagon gave her best attempt at a weak smile, Beelzebub felt as though her thoughts could move again. And like the flies circling her head, they came on in a swarm.

You didn’t get crowned the prince of hell by acting on impulse, and you didn’t stay the prince of hell by choosing your words poorly. But Beelzebub didn’t need to think before speaking.

“Dagon,” she said, rising from her chair. “Dagon, you stupid git. Four days of fuming and stewing over _this_?”

“Well, more like five days,” Dagon corrected. “And that’s another thing, boss. The way this has all been affecting your sense of time—”

“ _Bugger_ my sense of time!” Beelzebub laughed. She couldn’t help it. This was all the most ridiculous—

But Dagon was looking rather green about the gills—well, greener than usual. So Beelzebub calmed herself as she stood and cupped her left hand around Dagon’s scaly cheek.

“Did you really think I’d, what, lose my temper at you over a bit of jealousy? Send you packing to some other archduke’s court just because you don’t like the archangel I’m—”

_That I’m doing what with, exactly?_

“That I’ve taken up with?” she went for. “We’re in hell, Dags. The fact you, me, and our dukes even like each other at all is a blessed miracle.”

Dagon cringed. “He really must be rubbing off on you if you’re going around dropping M-bombs like that.” But her tone was light, and her smile surer of itself.

Beelzebub gave her a what-can-you-do? shrug. “He isn’t you, Dags. Juzzt like you aren’t Hastur, and Hastur isn’t Ligur. Though,” she amended, “sometimes I’m not so sure about that.”

That got a snort of laughter.

_None too soon._

Beelzebub leaned down and kissed her forehead as she ran a hand over Dagon’s thick curls. “And an archangel can’t be my left-hand demon. And never will be.”

When she withdrew and looked into Dagon’s eyes, they were back to their usual icy clearness.

Dagon sighed heavily as she squeezed Beelzebub’s hand, then let it go with a pat. “Well. All right, then. Just so long as he remembers to stay in his place at your right hand, then.”

First this business about a consort, now this. Really, what _was_ she going on about?

_He’s my pet. I’m his master. That’s how this works. He kneels at my feet—_

_Oh._

“Bless it,” she groaned.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“He’s been everywhere but at my right hand lately, hasn’t he?” Beelzebub ran said hand over her face, scowling.

_When Michael said he wanted a cage, they didn’t mean he wanted to be locked up in one and left there all alone._

_Well, fuck me. Five—six?—days in, and I’m doing a heaven of a job here. He must feel—_

“You know,” Dagon said, “I don’t even want to know if there’s another meaning to that, because I’m sure there is.”

And there was the regular Dagon, fully restored.

“Go on with you now,” Dagon said, shooing her away with a hand. “Back to your archangel before you say something else I don’t want to know about. And don’t even think about coming in tomorrow.” She wrinkled her nose. “If you do, I’ll have to think about even more things I don’t want to—like what you did when you were away. And I’m already having enough trouble as it is with not thinking about what you’re going to get up to. No, don’t you dare,” she threatened when Beelzebub remained where she stood. “We didn’t work around the clock with all available staff for you to just”—she swirled her hand in the air—“ _stand there_ trying to look useful. Especially when you know blessed well where you’ll really be useful.” She said this last sentence on a growl.

“And here you said you didn’t want to think about things like that.”

“I don’t.” Dagon waved her on again. “And the longer you stay here, the more I will.” 

Beelzebub nodded, turned, and walked to the door. She hesitated for a moment, another rarely used word threatening to move from the back of her mind to her tongue. But then she sucked in a breath, squared her shoulders, and left, shutting the door after her.

She’d promised Gabriel a cage. Instead, she’d given him a prison.

It was time to show him that she knew the difference.


	9. Chapter 9

Gabriel had tried to will himself to patience and understanding. When that had failed, he’d moved on to forbearance and charity. He’d never been any good at the latter, though, so when what charity he did have began to wilt, he’d tried longsuffering and resignation.

And then he’d found Beelzebub’s conservatory.

A pianoforte, draped with a plastic cover. Gabriel pushed it aside to run his hands along the keys.

“Slightly out of tune,” he said as the middle C jangled.

He moved on to the harpsicord. The kettle drums. A small, angular desk-shaped thing that didn’t make any sounds no matter where he touched it.

A wall of stringed instruments. Guitars. Violins. Violas. Cellos. Lutes. A zither of all things!

The large harp in the corner.

Gabriel put down the fiddle he’d been examining and headed toward it, bare feet slapping on the hard floor.

Hell’s half-light was more like three-quarters strong in Beelzebub’s rooms. Far darker than the endless daylight in heaven, but bright enough for him to study the instrument’s details. Gilded body, patterned with carvings of leaves and the chubby little faces of putti. The strings quivered beneath his fingers, the sound heavenly, even in hell.

“A harp,” he said, moving back to study it. “She’s got a harp.” He chuckled. “Can you imagine?” he asked, turning to the empty room, arms spread out, as if to embrace the air.

“She has a harp,” he told the space. “She has a fucking harp!”

Continuing to chuckle, he padded back across the room to the piano and looked at its small bench.

“Hard wood,” he mused. “Nice leather covering.” The seat was firm and soft to the touch, though a bit dusty, just like everything else in this room.

“And everything else in every other room.”

Gabriel shook his head, still chuckling as he explored the seat. Pressed a knuckle against it. Watched the cushion slowly rise.

“A harp.” He shook his head. “Of all the things to—”

He grabbed the bench by its legs and hefted it into his arms.

This time, his feet pounded against the floor as he crossed the room.

He didn’t stop smashing it into the harp until both had broken in half.

The strings jangled all out of tune as Gabriel slid down onto his knees and bowed his head into his hands. They stung from where the wooden bench had abraded them, and a few of his nails were cracked. It should have bothered him. No long ago, a broken nail by itself would seriously have upset him. But the crazy thing was, he didn’t fucking care at all now. 

He couldn’t do this anymore.

He never should have come here.

“Are you finished destroying my conservatory now, or would you like me to come back at a more convenient time?”

The sound of her voice had him lifting his head and turning to face her. And there was that feeling like beating feathers in his chest.

She stood in the doorway, shoulders back, hands on the slight swell of her hips; her dark blue eyes even darker, the ambered light of the room making the burns that slashed across her face look even more stunning—

_No._

He was angry at her.

Furious.

And he couldn’t do this anymore.

“I’m surprised any time is convenient for you at all,” he snarled as he pushed himself back to his feet. He’d definitely bruised his knees, but fuck it. And fuck her. “Though I guess I should be flattered, right? At least you’re awake enough to talk to me. What happened? Are you bored of the office now?”

“Since you asked so politely—”

“‘Politely,’ she says—”

“—we’ve finished preparing for the quarterly conference—”

“Oh, God, yes! The quarterly _conference_!” Laughing with more feigned mirth than he could remember ever having done, Gabriel slapped his hands against his thighs, then threw them toward the ceiling.

“—that heaven has, too, which you blessed well know—”

“Of course I damned well know it!” Gabriel rounded on her, hands in the air again. “But do you know something, _Beelzebub_?” He stalked toward her, shaking a finger at her. “Even when I was up to my eyebrows in _paperwork_ , and _meetings_ , and _preparations_ ,” he singsonged, “I actually remembered I had other responsibilities.

“Oh, I see. You’re folding your arms over your chest like you do when you don’t believe me. Well, let me tell you something. I don’t know how you run things down here”—he gestured around the room—“but where _I_ come from, _I_ somehow managed to get all that work done without completely ignoring the members of my team.

“Don’t you dare look at me like you don’t believe me! I know what you’re thinking. What you all think. That I’m just some—some clothes-obsessed—” He ran a hand over his face. “But do you know something, Beelzebub? _Do_ you? When Uriel was in tears while telling me she’d fucked up an important part of our presentation, did I ignore her? No! I told her it was okay, that someone else could take over what I needed to do for as long as it took for us to fix it. _Together_.

“When Sandalphon had a panic attack a day before it was their turn to present, did I tell them I was busy and wave them off? Hell, no. I gave them a hug and let them rehearse everything they were going to say, over and over, until they felt it was perfect.

“When Michael—” Gabriel laughed and shook his head. “Oh, Michael, Michael, Michael. You think they’re perfect, don’t you? That they can do my job better than me. Well, let me tell you something. They talk a good game when it’s all about war, and strategy, and whatever the Earth Observation Team is doing flawlessly this time. But guess what? When it comes to actually working with our tech, or making sure the desks are big enough for everyone’s fucking retinue to stand at, or making the room’s miracle field strong enough so that everyone’s CloudPhone can work? Because when it comes to that, let me tell you. They’re an _absolute fucking moron_!

“You wanna know who fixes the presentation software after Michael fucks it up for the billionth time? Or makes sure that Maintenance gets all the desks we need so we don’t have to miracle them up like we didn’t bother to get a headcount? Who makes sure that everyone’s phone keeps working—which, by the way, is harder than it looks. Do you know?” Gabriel smacked a fist against his bare chest. “Me! That’s who. Yes, _me_. You know, the angel who, despite everything, was apparently stupid enough—” He swallowed. “St-stupid enough….”

He swallowed again. Turned away to take some breaths. Walk it off. Run a hand through his hair again.

While she just fucking stood there, not saying a thing.

“Do you want to know what I’ve been doing here, while waiting for you to come home? Fine, don’t answer. I’ve been wandering around this place like a fool, talking to empty rooms. And you know what they all have in common? All of them are filled with things you don’t need. These things”—he swept a hand behind him at the wall of instruments and the shattered harp. “A bathtub. A bed. A chess set. An _office_!” A laugh burst from him again. “I don’t know why you need one here, by the way. You practically live in the one you actually use. All of these things that no demons or angels need or even want. What the hell is wrong with you?”

Gabriel wanted to keep screaming at her. To tell her everything that had swirled through his mind for the last—how many days had this been going on? It didn’t matter. It could have been ten days or ten-thousand years, and it wouldn’t have mattered. He wanted to tell her everything, and then tell it to her again, and again, and again, until she _understood_.

He opened his mouth to do just that.

Words. Too many of them, and none of them even half-formed, all of them fighting to get out at once.

Then nothing. Just silence. And a soft, strangled sound that couldn’t have been coming from him. Because nothing like that had ever come from him. Not even when he’d put down his horn and picked up a sword and done the most difficult thing he’d ever had to do. At least until he’d practically thrown himself into the arms of two kidnappers.

He bit his lip and turned away, and his head sank toward his chest. “I can’t do this anymore, Beelzebub. I can’t just be another thing you collect and put in a corner to just gather dust when you find something more interesting. More … just. Just _more_.”

He closed his eyes and bit his lip.

“Because if that’s all this is. If that’s all you want from me, then I’m going. I don’t care who’s in charge now. I’m leaving. Because I’m not going to just be….”

Silence. The faint protest of broken harp strings.

“So,” he said before clearing his throat. “So that’s it, huh? All of that, and you’ve got nothing to say.”

“No. It was just your turn to talk.”

Steps across the hardwood floor. Not strides. Not those of a prince.

He could feel her behind him, standing just inches away.

The scent of clove, pepper….

“I guess I deserved all that.”

It wasn’t her princely voice. Not her bedroom voice either. Something softer. Something more than both.

“No. I deserved all that.” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

Gabriel stopped his feet before they could turn his body to face her.

Repentance. An angel should understand that. Forgive that.

_An angel shouldn’t be in hell, either._

“And that makes it all better, huh?”

Silence again.

Maybe she’d get the fucking point and leave.

And damn him, but he hoped she wouldn’t.

“This isn’t easy for me.”

“Well, _sorry_ for being such an inconvenience! I guess you’re the real victi—”

“Stop, Gabriel. Just. Stop. _Please_. That isn’t what I mean, and I think you know it.”

He shrugged.

“What I mean is that demons don’t apologize often. We also don’t say _please_ much, either. Or t _hank you_. Or…. Anything you’re used to hearing. So I’m going to say something else you don’t hear down here either.”

“Let me guess: excuses.”

“No. I’m going to say: you’re right.”

Gabriel’s feet turned him before he could stop them.

Beelzebub was standing close enough to kiss. He didn’t want to look at her lips, but he did. Then again, it was better than looking at her eyes.

“I was irrezzponsible. I had you brought here knowing blessed well that things were about to get very busy. Waiting a few more weeks wouldn’t have hurt. But when I’m not being the prince of hell—when I’m just being Beelzebub the demon—I can be….”

Her lips tried to quirk into a sad sort of smile.

“Well. Gluttonous. Just like you’ve seen. Instruments. Furniture. Rooms. _Work_. I thought, ‘Sure, bring him down here. We’ll have a day together in bed, and then it’s back to work.’ Only it wasn’t. I thought it would be. I was wrong.”

He wanted to yell at her again. To tell her that none of these newly discovered feelings mattered; to stop making excuses.

But when he opened his mouth to do so, he found that he wanted something very different.

“May I touch you?” she asked.

Yes, something like that. Something that ended with her hand on him.

But when her calloused palm cupped his cheek, he didn’t lean into it.

“Will you look at me?” she asked.

This time, he didn’t even consider protesting.

“I was wrong,” she said again. “And you aren’t a thing to be collected and put away until I feel like taking you out again. You’re something—some _one_ —new in a place that never changes, in a routine that never changes. I didn’t know how to change with it. I still don’t know how.” She ran a finger along his ear. “But I’m going to learn to. Which is also something new for me. Can you understand that?”

Gabriel found himself nodding. Heaven didn’t change, either. If the situation was reversed, would he have handled this any better?

_Of course I—_

_No. And you know it too._

“Yes,” he said, both to her and to himself. “But it still hurts.”

“And not in the fun way.” She moved her hand into his hair.

“Not in the fun way,” he agreed as his eyes closed. “I’m still angry. And hurt.”

“I know, pet.”

“And I want to know how it can hurt less.”

“So do I. Will you find that out with me?”

Gabriel nodded, but doing that didn’t feel like enough.

“Okay.” Her thumb circled his lips. “May I kiss you now?”

But that did. And as she pressed her lips to his, he opened his mouth to let her inside.

Something heavy fell away from him and clattered to the floor.

“I shouldn’t have left this on, either,” she said when he stepped back to look down at his uncaged cock. “And here I was trying to teach _you_ self-control.”

Fuck, but her fingers felt so good on him. Gabriel closed his eyes as a soft moan shivered through him.

“That’s right.” Her hand was suddenly slick all over as it curved around his shaft. “You like that, pet?”

“Yes. O-oh! Oh yes,” he added as her palm shifted his balls in gentle circles.

“Do you want it?”

“Yes.”

“Is it enough?”

“No,” he whimpered. “Nothing is ever enough.”

“Then lean against me, and let me give you more than enough.”

Gabriel rested his head on her shoulder and held on as she touched, slow, so painfully slow; then when he begged for it, faster; faster still when he curled his arms around her back; faster, and faster, and harder, and longer and oh—

“Oh, God….”

And he couldn’t stop, he couldn’t stop. He just couldn’t—

He was in her arms, the cold floor beneath his legs, her warm chest pressed against him.

“There you go.” Beelzebub kissed his neck. “There you go.” And when he turned his head toward her, she kissed him again.

“What do you want now, pet?” she asked pressing her forehead to his.

“I don’t know,” he murmured. “More of this. But I don’t know. Is that the problem?” He turned in her arms and eased back onto his knees so he could look into her eyes. “Is it because I’ve never done this before? Because I don’t know what I’m—”

“Shh.” She pressed her finger against his lips. “No, it isn’t, and really, Gabriel. Do you think I’m an exzzpert at this either? I’m a gluttony demon, not a lust demon,” she said with a chuckle as he raised his eyebrows. “And even if I were one— Well.” She shook her head. “That isn’t the point. But you aren’t something I’ve collected, pet. You’re here because I want you to be. You’re here as long as you want to stay where you are. And I’m here—”

She curled her tongue along the curves of his ear.

“I’m here for your entertainment.”

“I’m not here for yours?”

“Oh, you’re _very_ entertaining,” she assured. “But I have to be doing the entertaining too. And when I’m not— Please don’t ask me to explain that again,” she groaned when Gabriel tilted his head in confusion. “I’m trying to ask what you want me to do tonight. To you. With you. I’m asking because I want to do that.”

Gabriel bit his lower lip. “But what if I don’t know what I want? No,” he said as Beelzebub stopped nibbling his ear. “I know what I want. It’s what you’ve done all along.” He took her hands in his. “I want you to decide. Just as long as you don’t decide to leave me alone. Please don’t do that again? At least, not like that.”

“Not again,” Beelzebub agreed with a nod before raising his hands to her lips and kissing them both. “So, prince’s choice. Hmm.” She tapped her lips with a finger as she considered; perhaps he was just imagining it, but even her flies seemed pensive. “Hmm…. Oh!”

The smirk that spread from the center of her mouth was the very definition of diabolical.

“You asked why I have two offices: one here, and the one where I work.”

“Well … yes. Master,” he added, even though Beelzebub hadn’t scowled or narrowed her eyes to correct him. “Where I’m from, the office is the office. No one has a setup like this at all.”

“Yes, of course. No one really has it here, either. So, I really don’t have an answer for you— Or, I didn’t.”

How could a diabolical smile become even more diabolical?

“Would you like me to show you what that … setup is for?”

Before today, Gabriel wouldn’t have expected that question. He would have expected her to tug his hair, pull him to his feet, drag him where she wanted him to go.

_For my entertainment…._

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’d like that. But if you didn’t ask if I wanted to go—”

“Yes?”

“Well. I’d like that even more.”

“It wouldn’t be enough?”

 _Predatory_. That was the word he needed to describe her smile now.

“I’ll tell you when it’s enough.”

“Well,” Beelzebub considered, tilting her head to the side in exaggerated thought. “All right, then,” she said as she eased up from the floor. “No,” she snapped as Gabriel moved to his knees to stand with her. “No one told you to get up. You aren’t going there because you want to. You’re going there because I said so. And that means you’re going to crawl.”

“Yes, Master.” His cock was already rising again. Would she be able to—

“No one told you to touch that, either,” she snapped as he reached for the cage. “Leave it. I’ve got a much better test in mind.” She turned and strode to the door, where she raised her left hand and snapped her fingers. “Come. If you aren’t right behind me when we get there, then this is going to be much, much worse for you. And not in a way you’ll like.”

“Yes, M—”

“No talking,” she growled as she peered back over her shoulder. “Not until we’re through.”

She stepped through the door, back straight, steps confident, shoulders back.

With the heart that he didn’t have pounding impossibly throughout his body, Gabriel scurried after her.


End file.
